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  Ring of Bright Water - A Trilogy

  Gavin Maxwell

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  This classic memoir of otters in the Scottish Highlands and the naturalist who cared for them is “one of the outstanding wildlife books of all time” (New York Herald Tribune). 
   
  While touring the Iraqi marshes, Gavin Maxwell was captivated by an otter and became a devoted advocate of and spokesman for the species. Maxwell moved to a remote house in the Scottish Highlands, co-habiting there with three otters and living an idyllic and isolated life—until fate, fame, and fire conspired against him.  
   
  This volume weaves together the Scottish otter stories from Maxwell’s three non-fiction books, Ring of Bright Water, The Rocks Remain, and Raven Meet Thy Brother—and includes his beautifully expressive illustrations. Ring of Bright Water: A Trilogy stands as a lasting tribute to a man, his work, and his passion for another species.

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  Doctor Wore Petticoats - Women...

  Chris Enss

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  "NO WOMEN NEED APPLY."These four discouraging words of admonition often greeted female physicians looking for jobs in the frontier-era West. Despite the dire need for medical help, it seemed most trappers, miners, and emigrants would rather suffer and die than be treated by a female doctor. Nevertheless dozens of highly trained women headed West, where they endured hardship and prejudice as they set broken limbs, performed operations, delivered generations of babies—and solidified a place for women in the medical field.Susan La Flesche, the youngest daughter of an Omaha Indian Chief, felt called to medicine when at the age of twelve she saw a woman die because a government-paid doctor was too busy hunting prairie chickens to help. Destitute divorcee Bethenia Owens Adair traded in laundry work for a successful medical practice. Flora Hayward Stanford, the first female doctor in Deadwood, was known to patch up gunfight victims and to treat the likes of Buffalo Bill Cody and Calamity Jane. With a determination and strength of spirit that resonates even today, these incredible women and seven others profiled in The Doctor Wore Petticoats are sure to inspire.

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  Cognitive Surplus - Creativity...

  Clay Shirky

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  For decades, technology encouraged people to squander their time and intellect as passive consumers. Today, technology has finally caught up with human potential. In Cognitive Surplus, Internet guru Clay Shirky forecasts the thrilling changes we will all enjoy as new digital technology puts our untapped resources of talent and goodwill to use at last.Since we Americans were suburbanized and educated by the postwar boom, we've had a surfeit of intellect, energy, and time-what Shirky calls a cognitive surplus. But this abundance had little impact on the common good because television consumed the lion's share of it-and we consume TV passively, in isolation from one another. Now, for the first time, people are embracing new media that allow us to pool our efforts at vanishingly low cost. The results of this aggregated effort range from mind expanding-reference tools like Wikipedia-to lifesaving, such as Ushahidi.com, which has allowed Kenyans to sidestep government censorship and report on acts of violence in real time.Shirky argues persuasively that this cognitive surplus-rather than being some strange new departure from normal behavior-actually returns our society to forms of collaboration that were natural to us up through the early twentieth century. He also charts the vast effects that our cognitive surplus-aided by new technologies-will have on twenty-first-century society, and how we can best exploit those effects. Shirky envisions an era of lower creative quality on average but greater innovation, an increase in transparency in all areas of society, and a dramatic rise in productivity that will transform our civilization.The potential impact of cognitive surplus is enormous. As Shirky points out, Wikipedia was built out of roughly 1 percent of the man-hours that Americans spend watching TV every year. Wikipedia and other current products of cognitive surplus are only the iceberg's tip. Shirky shows how society and our daily lives will be improved dramatically as we learn to exploit our goodwill and free time like never before.

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  The White River Badlands -...

  Rachel C. Benton, Dennis O....

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  This guide to the South Dakota region that houses the world’s richest fossil beds does “an excellent job of presenting the current state of knowledge” (Choice). The forbidding Big Badlands in Western South Dakota contain the richest fossil beds in the world. Even today these rocks continue to yield new specimens brought to light by snowmelt and rain washing away soft rock deposited on a floodplain long ago. The quality and quantity of the fossils are superb: most of the species to be found there are known from hundreds of specimens. The fossils in the White River Group (and similar deposits in the American west) preserve the entire late Eocene through the middle Oligocene, roughly 35-30 million years ago and more than thirty million years after non-avian dinosaurs became extinct. The fossils provide a detailed record of a period of abrupt global cooling and what happened to creatures who lived through it. This book is a comprehensive reference to the sediments and fossils of the Big Badlands, and also touches on National Park Service management policies that help protect such significant fossils.Includes photos and illustrations“A worthy successor to the work of O’Harra.” —Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology

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  The Simulation Hypothesis - An...

  Rizwan Virk

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  The Simulation Hypothesis, by best-selling author, renowned MIT computer scientist and Silicon Valley video game designer Rizwan Virk, is the first serious book to explain one of the most daring and consequential theories of our time. Riz is the Executive Director of Play Labs @ MIT, a video game startup incubator at the MIT Game Lab. 
  Drawing from research and concepts from computer science, artificial intelligence, video games, quantum physics, and referencing both speculative fiction and ancient eastern spiritual texts, Virk shows how all of these traditions come together to point to the idea that we may be inside a simulated reality like the Matrix. 
  The Simulation Hypothesis is the idea that our physical reality, far from being a solid physical universe, is part of an increasingly sophisticated video game-like simulation, where we all have multiple lives, consisting of pixels with its own internal clock run by some giant Artificial Intelligence. Simulation theory explains some of the biggest mysteries of quantum and relativistic physics, such as quantum indeterminacy, parallel universes, and the integral nature of the speed of light. 
  Recently, the idea that we may be living in a giant video game has received a lot of attention: 
  "The chances that we not in a simualtion is one in billions." -Elon Musk 
  "I find it hard to argue we are not in a simulation." -Neil deGrasse Tyson 
  "We are living in computer generated reality." -Philip K. Dick 
  Whether you are a computer scientist, a fan of science fiction like the Matrix movies, a video game enthusiast, or a spiritual seeker, The Simulation Hypothesis touches on all these areas, and you will never look at the world the same way again!

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  Multihull Seamanship - An A-Z of...

  Gavin Le Sueur

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  This is an A-Z of seamanship skills for multihull sailors. There are many textbooks on the market which detail general seamanship principles. This is not one of them. Multihull Seamanship is about sea-going catamarans and trimarans and the skills needed to understand and enjoy them to their utmost. Both racing and cruising yachts are catered for, as are trailer-able multihulls. Seamanship is not a black and white skill. It is an evolution of knowledge; a building of information through experiment, thought and experience. There is no definitive word on an evolving skill. Multihull Seamanship started as Dr Gavin Le Sueur's personal index of 'how-to's. It has grown through experience and others sharing their knowledge. It should be on the book shelf of every catamaran and trimaran. This book is for people who are already multihull sailors, or for those who are contemplating multihull sailing. It has served this community for over 20 years and this second edition is fully updated. It is illustrated with delightful line drawings by Nigel Allison.

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