Flying Cars Zombie Dogs And Robot Overlords

Author : Charles Pappas
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2017-11-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9781630762407

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Flying Cars, Zombie Dogs, and Robot Overlords by Charles Pappas Pdf

Every time you chew a stick of Juicy Fruit, eat a hamburger, slip on a nylon, plug your phone into a wall socket, flick on a TV, withdraw money from an ATM, lick an ice-cream cone, switch on a computer, ride an escalator, play a DVR, watch a movie about dinosaurs, or pop a tranquilizer, you’re doing something that originated at a world’s fair or trade expo. In fact, each new technology and every novel product that rocked America and rolled the world, from the Colt revolver and the Corvette to fax machines and flush toilets, started at trade fairs, a $100 billion industry that includes world expos, trade shows, and state fairs. More than just promoting material things, however, trade fairs popularized and evangelized every social movement and cultural concept, too, including Manifest Destiny, the closing of the frontier, Nudism, Nazism, Fascism, eugenics, female suffrage, temperance, and technocracy. While there have been notable works on world’s fairs by Robert Rydell, Erik Larsen, Erik Mattie, and others, they only capture a fragment of the whole mosaic of these shows—a mosaic that makes the glitziest Las Vegas spectacle look like an Amish barn-raising. This amusing book covers, for example, the World’s Fair that featured a nudist colony (1935); Salvador Dali’s half-naked lobster women, their virtue barely secured by well-placed crustaceans (1939); a model of the Liberty Bell made of Oranges (1893); one of Thomas Edison’s lesser-known inventions, the prefabricated concrete home (1907); and the Bayer Company’s experiment with selling heroin. More memorable and culturally iconic debuts discussed here include electricity, radios, the Volkswagen and the Corvette, television, the X-ray machine, air conditioning, and even nylon stockings. Dozens of short, illustrated chapters take the reader through over 150 years of world and trade fairs, from the vibrators displayed by sexual health advocates at the 1900 World’s Fair to the first true IMAX film at Expo ’70 in Japan.

Author : Jeff Herman
Publisher : New World Library
Page : 674 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2016-09-01
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9781608684052

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Jeff Herman's Guide to Book Publishers, Editors and Literary Agents 2017 by Jeff Herman Pdf

Still the Best Guide for Getting Published If you want to get published, read this book! Comprehensive index lists dozens of subjects and categories to help you find the perfect publisher or agent. Jeff Herman’s Guide unmasks nonsense, clears confusion, and unlocks secret doorways to success for new and veteran writers! This highly respected resource is used by publishing insiders everywhere and has been read by millions all over the world. Jeff Herman’s Guide is the writer’s best friend. It reveals the names, interests, and contact information of thousands of agents and editors. It presents invaluable information about more than 350 publishers and imprints (including Canadian and university presses), lists independent book editors who can help you make your work more publisher-friendly, and helps you spot scams. Jeff Herman’s Guide unseals the truth about how to outsmart the gatekeepers, break through the barriers, and decipher the hidden codes to getting your book published. Countless writers have achieved their highest aspirations by following Herman’s outside-the-box strategies. If you want to reach the top of your game and transform rejections into contracts, you need this book!

Author : James Pethokoukis
Publisher : Center Street
Page : 317 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2023-10-03
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781546006107

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The Conservative Futurist by James Pethokoukis Pdf

Discover the surprising case for how conservatism can help us achieve the epic sci-fi future we were promised. America was once the world’s dream factory. We turned imagination into reality, from curing polio to landing on the Moon to creating the internet. And we were confident that more wonders lay just over the horizon: clean and infinite energy, a cure for cancer, computers and robots as humanity’s great helpers, and space colonies. (Also, of course, flying cars.) Science fiction, from The Jetsons to Star Trek, would become fact. But as we moved into the late 20th century, we grew cautious, even cynical, about what the future held and our ability to shape it. Too many of us saw only the threats from rapid change. The year 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of the start of the Great Downshift in technological progress and economic growth, followed by decades of economic stagnation, downsized dreams, and a popular culture fixated on catastrophe: AI that will take all our jobs if it doesn’t kill us first, nuclear war, climate chaos, plague and the zombie apocalypse. We are now at risk of another half-century of making the same mistakes and pushing a pro-progress future into the realm of impossibility. But American Enterprise Institute (AEI) economic policy expert and long-time CNBC contributor James Pethokoukis argues that there’s still hope. We can absolutely turn things around—if we the people choose to dream and act. How dare we delay or fail to deliver for ourselves and our children. With groundbreaking ideas and sharp analysis, Pethokoukis provides a detailed roadmap to a fantastic future filled with incredible progress and prosperity that is both optimistic and realistic. Through an exploration of culture, economics, and history, The Conservative Futurist tells the fascinating story of what went wrong in the past and what we need to do today to finally get it right. Using the latest economic research and policy analysis, as well as insights from top economists, historians, and technologists, Pethokoukis reveals that the failed futuristic visions of the past were totally possible. And they still are. If America is to fully recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, take full advantage of emerging tech from generative AI to CRISPR to reusable rockets, and launch itself into a shining tomorrow, it must again become a fully risk-taking, future-oriented society. It’s time for America to embrace the future confidently, act boldly, and take that giant leap forward.

Author : Charles Pappas
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2019-07-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9781493038442

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One Giant Leap by Charles Pappas Pdf

On July 20, 1969, Americans had their eyes and ears glued to their TVs and radios. NASA’s successful moon landing left the nation in awe. This moment inspired inventors and engineers across the nation. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the 1969 moon landing, we share with you 20 patents that were inspired by the space race and how they reshaped the world. Featuring the original patent schematics from the US Patent and Trademark Office, blast off with the inventions inspired by the moon landing including: Memory foam Freeze-dried food Firefighting equipment Emergency "space blankets" DustBusters Cordless tools Protective paint (Used on both the Statue of Liberty, a gigantic Buddha in Hong Kong and the Golden Gate) Cochlear implants LZR Racer swimsuits CMOS image sensors Moon dust as fuel for space travel Carbon nanotubes Pocket calculators Other patents in the book reflect the general surge in space-related inventions in that era: Dispersed space based laser weapon Toy ray guns Flying saucers Propulsion systems Lasers The modem Integrated circuit Astro Lamp (Later called the Lava Lamp)

Author : Charles Pappas
Publisher : Writer's Digest Books
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2005-10-01
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 1582973873

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It's a Bitter Little World by Charles Pappas Pdf

Learn Life's Hard Lessons from Film Noir &break;&break;If you want to know the meaning of life, don't study Shakespeare, don't peruse Plato. Everything you need to know in life you can learn from film noir. And everything you can learn from film noir, you can find in It's a Bitter Little World. &break;&break;Author Charles Pappas scavenged sixty years of film noir - from The Maltese Falcon to Sin City - to find the answers to everything that ever perplexed men and vexed women. &break;&break;Arranged by decade, the scalding quotes and cigarette-burn dialogue reflect an America morphing from Sinatra and fedoras to P. Diddy and Botox. The language is a swig of Rum-and-Coke at breakfast. It's the last words at a funeral nobody came to. It's a saxophone on a rainy night when you can't sleep. It's all the loneliness and despair and romance and courage in your life rolled up into one neat package.

Author : David Hackett Fischer
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 972 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 1991-03-14
Category : History
ISBN : 019974369X

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Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer Pdf

This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.

Author : Dan Sinker
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2011-09-13
Category : Humor
ISBN : 9781451655148

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The F***ing Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel by Dan Sinker Pdf

Presents the full content of the popular fake twitter account that followed Rahm Emanuel's 2011 Chicago mayoral campaign.

Author : David Wallace-Wells
Publisher : Tim Duggan Books
Page : 384 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2019-02-19
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780525576723

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The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells Pdf

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The Uninhabitable Earth hits you like a comet, with an overflow of insanely lyrical prose about our pending Armageddon.”—Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker • The New York Times Book Review • Time • NPR • The Economist • The Paris Review • Toronto Star • GQ • The Times Literary Supplement • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible—food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation. An “epoch-defining book” (The Guardian) and “this generation’s Silent Spring” (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it—the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress. The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation—today’s. LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/E.O. WILSON LITERARY SCIENCE WRITING AWARD “The Uninhabitable Earth is the most terrifying book I have ever read. Its subject is climate change, and its method is scientific, but its mode is Old Testament. The book is a meticulously documented, white-knuckled tour through the cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet.”—Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times “Riveting. . . . Some readers will find Mr. Wallace-Wells’s outline of possible futures alarmist. He is indeed alarmed. You should be, too.”—The Economist “Potent and evocative. . . . Wallace-Wells has resolved to offer something other than the standard narrative of climate change. . . . He avoids the ‘eerily banal language of climatology’ in favor of lush, rolling prose.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times “The book has potential to be this generation’s Silent Spring.”—The Washington Post “The Uninhabitable Earth, which has become a best seller, taps into the underlying emotion of the day: fear. . . . I encourage people to read this book.”—Alan Weisman, The New York Review of Books

Author : Jaron Lanier
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 242 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2010-01-12
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 9780307593146

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You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier Pdf

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER A programmer, musician, and father of virtual reality technology, Jaron Lanier was a pioneer in digital media, and among the first to predict the revolutionary changes it would bring to our commerce and culture. Now, with the Web influencing virtually every aspect of our lives, he offers this provocative critique of how digital design is shaping society, for better and for worse. Informed by Lanier’s experience and expertise as a computer scientist, You Are Not a Gadget discusses the technical and cultural problems that have unwittingly risen from programming choices—such as the nature of user identity—that were “locked-in” at the birth of digital media and considers what a future based on current design philosophies will bring. With the proliferation of social networks, cloud-based data storage systems, and Web 2.0 designs that elevate the “wisdom” of mobs and computer algorithms over the intelligence and wisdom of individuals, his message has never been more urgent.

Author : Larry Kulchawik
Publisher : Page Publishing Inc
Page : 475 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2015-04-17
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781634175074

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Trade Shows From One Country To The Next by Larry Kulchawik Pdf

Shows from One Country to the Next is a guidebook to help recalculate your thinking when marketing in multiple countries. “Trade Shows from One Country to the Next” delves into international marketing differences, with a focus specifically on global trade shows. Rather than concentrate on details about marketing, this book focuses on the needed adjustments that need be made, physically and culturally, when presenting your products and services at an international trade show. Although dedicated to trade show design and regulations, much of the information in this book speaks to effective communication skills that are required when spending a week or less marketing your services abroad. This book will not only appeal to exhibit managers, show organizers, venues and exhibit suppliers, but to those who market anything outside of their country of origin. Effective communication is the key! There is no right way, there is no wrong way, there is only a different way! Understand and respect what is different, and you are on your way to success with international marketing. Larry Kulchawik has served in the trade marketing industry for 45 years. As the first American president of IFES (International Federation of Exposition Services) he has met trade show supplier experts from around the world who have shared their opinions about achieving trade show marketing success in their countries.

Author : David Graeber
Publisher : Simon & Schuster
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2019-05-07
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781501143335

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Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber Pdf

From bestselling writer David Graeber—“a master of opening up thought and stimulating debate” (Slate)—a powerful argument against the rise of meaningless, unfulfilling jobs…and their consequences. Does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world? In the spring of 2013, David Graeber asked this question in a playful, provocative essay titled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.” It went viral. After one million online views in seventeen different languages, people all over the world are still debating the answer. There are hordes of people—HR consultants, communication coordinators, telemarketing researchers, corporate lawyers—whose jobs are useless, and, tragically, they know it. These people are caught in bullshit jobs. Graeber explores one of society’s most vexing and deeply felt concerns, indicting among other villains a particular strain of finance capitalism that betrays ideals shared by thinkers ranging from Keynes to Lincoln. “Clever and charismatic” (The New Yorker), Bullshit Jobs gives individuals, corporations, and societies permission to undergo a shift in values, placing creative and caring work at the center of our culture. This book is for everyone who wants to turn their vocation back into an avocation and “a thought-provoking examination of our working lives” (Financial Times).

Author : JF Dubeau
Publisher : Inkshares
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2016-03-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781941758601

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The Life Engineered by JF Dubeau Pdf

JF Dubeau’s debut novel, The Life Engineered begins in the year 3594, where humanity is little more than a memory—a legend of the distant past destined to reappear. Capeks, a race of artificial creatures originally created by humans, have inherited the galaxy and formed a utopian civilization built on the shared goal of tirelessly working to prepare for their makers’ return. One moment a cop dying in the line of duty in Boston, the next “reborn” as a Capek, Dagir must find her place in this intricate society. That vaguely remembered “death” was but the last of hundreds of simulated lives, distilling her current personality. A robot built for rescue and repair, she finds her abilities tested immediately after her awakening when the large, sentient facility that created her is destroyed, marking the only instance of murder the peaceful Capeks have ever known. For the first time in their history, conflicting philosophies clash, setting off a violent civil war that could lay waste to the stars themselves. Dagir sets off on a quest to find the killers, and finds much more than she sought. As the layers of the Capeks’ past peel away to reveal their early origins, centuries-old truths come to light. And the resulting revelations may tear humanity’s children apart—and destroy all remnants of humankind.

Author : Peter Watts
Publisher : Macmillan
Page : 386 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2009-01-06
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781429982214

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Maelstrom by Peter Watts Pdf

Second in the Rifters Trilogy, Hugo Award-winning author Peter Watts' Maelstrom is a terrifying explosion of cyberpunk noir. This is the way the world ends: A nuclear strike on a deep sea vent. The target was an ancient microbe—voracious enough to drive the whole biosphere to extinction—and a handful of amphibious humans called rifters who'd inadvertently released it from three billion years of solitary confinement. The resulting tsunami killed millions. It's not as through there was a choice: saving the world excuses almost any degree of collateral damage. Unless, of course, you miss the target. Now North America's west coast lies in ruins. Millions of refugees rally around a mythical figure mysteriously risen from the deep sea. A world already wobbling towards collapse barely notices the spread of one more blight along its shores. And buried in the seething fast-forward jungle that use to be called Internet, something vast and inhuman reaches out to a woman with empty white eyes and machinery in her chest. A woman driven by rage, and incubating Armageddon. Her name is Lenie Clarke. She's a rifter. She's not nearly as dead as everyone thinks. And the whole damn world is collateral damage as far as she's concerned. . . . At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Author : Charles Stross
Publisher : Tor Books
Page : 393 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2021-09-28
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781250807113

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Invisible Sun by Charles Stross Pdf

The alternate timelines of Charles Stross' Empire Games trilogy have never been so entangled than in Invisible Sun—the techno-thriller follow up to Dark State—as stakes escalate in a conflict that could spell extermination for humanity across all known timelines. An inter-timeline coup d'état gone awry. A renegade British monarch on the run through the streets of Berlin. And robotic alien invaders from a distant timeline flood through a wormhole, wreaking havoc in the USA. Can disgraced worldwalker Rita and her intertemporal extraordaire agent of a mother neutralize the livewire contention before it's too late? At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Author : Berin Szoka,Adam Marcus
Publisher : TechFreedom
Page : 578 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2011-06-10
Category : Computers
ISBN : 9780983820604

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The Next Digital Decade by Berin Szoka,Adam Marcus Pdf