Other books that might interest you

• 

  The Great Indoors - The...

  Emily Anthes

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Modern humans are an indoor species. We spend 90 percent of our time inside, shuttling between homes and offices, schools and stores, restaurants and gyms. And yet, in many ways, the indoor world remains unexplored territory. For all the time we spend inside buildings, we rarely stop to consider: How do these spaces affect our mental and physical well-being? Our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors? Our productivity, performance, and relationships?  
  In this wide-ranging, character-driven audiobook, science journalist Emily Anthes takes us on an adventure into the buildings in which we spend our days, exploring the profound and sometimes unexpected ways that they shape our lives. Drawing on cutting-edge research, she probes the painkilling power of a well-placed window and examines how the right office layout can expand our social networks. She investigates how room temperature regulates our cognitive performance, how the microbes hiding in our homes influence our immune systems, and how cafeteria design affects what—and how much—we eat. 
  Along the way, Anthes takes listeners into an operating room designed to minimize medical errors, a school designed to boost students’ physical fitness, and a prison designed to support inmates’ psychological needs. And she previews homes of the future, from the high-tech houses that could monitor our health to the 3D-printed structures that might allow us to live on the moon.

  Show book

• 

  Shakespeare and Music

  Christopher Wilson

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Shakespeare's plays are full of music: love songs, comic ditties, serious ballads, and songs for witches and spirits. Over the centuries musicians and composers have also created musical adaptations based on Shakespeare's plays.  Composer Christopher Wilson's Shakespeare and Music (1922) documents the musical history of each play across various genres, including opera and incidental music. (Summary by Elizabeth Klett)

  Show book

• 

  My Robot Gets Me - How Social...

  Carla Diana

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Your relationships with your "smart" products are about to get a lot more personal.Think how commonplace it is now for people to ask Siri for the weather forecast, deploy Roomba to clean their homes, or summon Alexa to turn on the lights. The "smart home" market will reach well over $100 billion in the next five years on the promise of products that are truly integrated with our cooking, cleaning, entertainment, security, and hygiene habits.But the reality is, these first-generation "smart" products aren't very smart—yet. We're clearly seeing only the tip of the iceberg in terms of capability and how such products can enhance our lives. How do we take it to the next level?In a word, design—and more specifically, social design. In this fascinating and instructive book, leading product design expert Carla Diana describes how new technology is allowing designers to humanize consumer products in delightfully subtle ways. Showcasing vivid examples of social design principles such as " product presence," "object expression," and "interaction intelligence," we see how inventive uses of light, sound, and movement can evoke human responses to even the most mundane products. Diana offers clear guidelines and takeaways for conceptualizing, building, and optimizing products using such methods as bodystorming, scenario storyboarding, video prototyping, behavior charting, and more.My Robot Gets Me provides keen insights and practical advice to anyone interested or involved in the burgeoning smart marketplace, from product designers and developers to managers and venture capitalists.

  Show book

• 

  Earthbag Building - The Tools...

  Kaki Hunter, Donald Kiffmeyer

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  The only comprehensive, illustrated, step-by-step guide to building with earthbags. Over seventy percent of Americans cannot afford to own a code-enforced, contractor-built home. This has led to widespread interest in using natural materials-straw, cob, and earth-for building homes and other buildings that are inexpensive, and that rely largely on labor rather than expensive and often environmentally-damaging outsourced materials. Earthbag Building  is the first comprehensive guide to all the tools, tricks, and techniques for building with bags filled with earth-or earthbags. Having been introduced to sandbag construction by the renowned Nader Khalili in 1993, the authors developed this "Flexible Form Rammed Earth Technique" over the last decade. A reliable method for constructing homes, outbuildings, garden walls and much more, this enduring, tree-free architecture can also be used to create arched and domed structures of great beauty-in any region, and at home, in developing countries, or in emergency relief work.This profusely illustrated guide first discusses the many merits of earthbag construction, and then leads the reader through the key elements of an earthbag building:Special design considerationsFoundations, walls, and floorsElectrical, plumbing, and shelvingLintels, windows and door installationsRoofs, arches and domesExterior and interior plasters.With dedicated sections on costs, making your own specialized tools, and building code considerations, as well as a complete resources guide,  Earthbag Building  is the long-awaited, definitive guide to this uniquely pleasing construction style. Mother Earth News  Wiser Living Series

  Show book

• 

  Ginsberg Remembers

  Allen Ginsberg

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  This is one man's trip from the late l940's to the early ‘80's, with lengthy stops in the Beat ’50's, the anti-war/psychedelic ’60's, and the ineffable ’70's. Poet, mystic, consousness explorer, activist and singer, Ginsberg tells all about his activities and inspirations, from the literary trio of Blake, Burroughs and Kerouac to Tibetan Buddhism.

  Show book

• 

  The Legends of the Pyramids -...

  Jason Colavito

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Could the Great Pyramid of Giza be a repository of ancient magical knowledge? Or perhaps evidence of a vanished pre—Ice Age civilization?Misinformation and myths have attached themselves to the Egyptian pyramids since ancient Greece and Rome. While many Americans believe that the pyramids were built by aliens, archaeologists understand that the Giza pyramids were built by the pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty around 2450 BCE. So why is there such a disconnect between scholarly opinion and the popular view of Egypt? In The Legends of the Pyramids, Jason Colavito takes us back to Late Antique Egypt, where the replacement of polytheism with Christianity gave rise to local efforts to rewrite the stories of Egyptian history in the image of the Bible. When the Arab conquest absorbed Egypt into the Islamic community, these stories then passed into Islamic historiography and reentered the West.Colavito's The Legends of the Pyramids lays open pop culture's view of Egypt in movies, TV shows, popular books, and New Age beliefs, detailing how the hidden history of Egypt has grown alongside the official history of archaeology and Egyptology.

  Show book