He was usually credited as Camille Flammarion. He was a prolific author of more than fifty titles, including popular science works about astronomy, several notable early science fiction novels, and several works about Spiritualism and related topics. He also published the magazine L'Astronomie, starting in 1882. He maintained a private observatory at Juvisy-sur-Orge, France. He was a founder and the first president of the Socit Astronomique de France, which originally had its own independent journal, BSAF (Bulletin de la Socit Astronomique de France), first published in 1887. He was the first to suggest the names Triton and Amalthea for moons of Neptune and Jupiter, respectively, although these names were not officially adopted until many decades later. His spiritualism studies influenced also some of his science fiction. Other than that his writing about other worlds adhered fairly closely to then current ideas in evolutionary theory and astronomy. Amongst his other works are: The Atmosphere (1873), Popular Astronomy (1907), Astronomy for Amateurs (1904), Omega: The Last Days of the World and Death and its Mystery.

    How does Jane Goodall’s relationship with her dog Rusty inform her thinking about our relationship to other species? Which time and place would Jared Diamond most prefer to live in, in light of his work on the role of chance in history? What does driving a sports car have to do with Steven Weinberg’s quest for the “theory of everything”? Physicist and journalist Stefan Klein’s intimate conversations with nineteen of the world’s best-known scientists (including three Nobel Laureates) let us listen in as they talk about their paradigm-changing work—and how it is deeply rooted in their daily lives. • Cosmologist Martin Rees on the beginning and end of the world • Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins on egoism and selflessness • Neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran on consciousness • Molecular biologist Elizabeth Blackburn on aging • Philosopher Peter Singer on morality • Physician and social scientist Nicholas Christakis on human relationships • Biochemist Craig Venter on the human genome • Chemist and poet Roald Hoffmann on beauty

    Then a catastrophic 1990 stock-market crash ushered in what the Japanese call their "lost decades." The end of the boom times should have plunged Japan into irrelevance. But in Pure Invention, Matt Alt argues that's precisely when things got interesting--when once again, Japan got to the future a little ahead of the rest of us.Japan made itself rich after the Second World War by selling the world what it needed, in the form of better cars, appliances, and microprocessors. But it conquered hearts through wildly creative pop culture that responded to modern life in new ways. As social compacts and safety nets evaporated, in rushed a revolution of geeky gadgets, gizmos, and flights of fancy. Hello Kitty, the Nintendo Entertainment System, and illustrated entertainment empires like Pokemon and Dragon Ball Z were more than marketing hits. They transformed Japan into the world's forge of fantasies, and they transformed us as we consumed them: karaoke making everyone a star, emoji rewriting the rules of human communication, virtual game-worlds offering escapes from reality and new perspectives on it.By turns a nostalgia trip and a secret history, Pure Invention is the story of an indelible group of Japanese craftsmen, artists, businesspeople, geniuses, and oddballs. It is also an unsung chapter of globalization, in which Japanese dreams formed a new blueprint for global pop culture--and may have created the modern world as we know it.

    The language could be compared to the building blocks of music (time signatures, chord progressions, verse)—no matter the instruments, style or time period—these building blocks come into play. Feel and sensation are similar building blocks where game design is concerned. They create the meta-sensation of involvement with a game.The understanding of how game designers create feel, and affect feel are only partially understood by most in the field and tends to be overlooked as a method or course of study, yet a game's feel is central to a game's success. This book brings the subject of feel to light by consolidating existing theories into a cohesive book.The book covers topics like the role of sound, ancillary indicators, the importance of metaphor, how people perceive things, and a brief history of feel in games.The associated web site contains a playset with ready-made tools to design feel in games, six key components to creating virtual sensation. There's a play palette too, so the designer can first experience the importance of that component by altering variables and feeling the results. The playset allows the reader to experience each of the sensations described in the book, and then allows them to apply them to their own projects. Creating game feel without having to program, essentially. The final version of the playset will have enough flexibility that the reader will be able to use it as a companion to the exercises in the book, working through each one to create the feel described.

    The brainchild of misfit maths genius Richard Garfield, Magic combines fiendishly complex gameplay with collectability. When it came out in the early '90s it transformed the lives of gamers who had longed for a game that combined challenging mechanics and kick-ass artwork with a chance to connect and compete with likeminded people. Titus Chalk's tale is part biography, charting the author's own relationship with the game, part history, and part love letter to the card game that made it cool to be a geek. Prepare to meet Generation Decks, a community like no other...

    A computational investigation into the human representation and processing of visual information.

    They built a fleet of turbine cars--automobiles with jet engines--and loaned them out to members of the public. The fleet logged over a million miles; the exercise was a raging success.            These turbine engines would run on any flammable liquid--tequila, heating oil, Chanel #5, diesel, alcohol, kerosene. If the cars had been mass produced, we might have cars today that do not require petroleum-derived fuels. The engine was also much simpler than the piston engine--it contained one-fifth the number of moving parts and required much less maintenance. The cars had no radiators or fan belts and never needed oil changes.             Yet Chrysler crushed and burned most of the cars two years later; the jet car's brief glory was over. Where did it all go wrong? Controversy still follows the program, and questions about how and why it was killed have never been satisfactorily answered.            Steve Lehto has interviewed all the surviving members of the turbine car program--from the metallurgist who created the exotic metals for the interior of the engine to the test driver who drove it at Chrysler’s proving grounds for days on end. Lehto takes these first-hand accounts and weaves them into a great story about the coolest car Detroit ever produced.

    In this brand-new puzzle collection you will find 100 pictorial, hand-crafted puzzle quizzes in different themes: logic, visual, spatial, counting, geometry, matchstick, coins, searching, and much more. Hot News Over 700 000 downloads for the Puzzlebook series! Discover why thousands of Kindle users are addicted to Puzzlebooks. Novelty All puzzle quizzes are original creations by the Grabarchuk Family and delivered exclusively for Kindle. Interactivity You can interactively answer and check a puzzle quiz by clicking the respective answer. Only the correct answer leads to the solution page. Learn more how to play Puzzlebook on different devices. Made Specially for E-readers Puzzlebook works fast on e-readers, graphic is sharp and simple. Images are black-and-white and specially optimized for e-ink devices. Enjoy it in Color and HD Too! Get 100 Puzzle Quizzes HD to enjoy entire new colorful experience playing Puzzlebook on Kindle Fire, Kindle Fire HD, iPad, iPhone, Android, PC, Mac, or other devices using a free Kindle app. For the first time Kindle Puzzlebook contains color high-definition images - four times bigger images compared to the previous version. Now each puzzle looks perfectly sharp and detailed with richer colors. Play Anywhere! Puzzlebook is specially designed for playing on any Kindle e-reader or tablet, as well on any other devices using a free Kindle app. Be sure to play it on different devices for more fun and comfort. Ranking The collection is specially created for all kinds of solvers - beginners, skillful, and experts alike. The puzzles are arranged so that you start with the easiest (*) puzzles and progress to the hardest (*****) puzzles. Happy Puzzling!

    It should be labelled 'start here'." --Pieter Jan Stappers, ID-StudioLab, Delft University of Technology

    An Edible History of Humanity is a pithy, entertaining account of how a series of changes—caused, enabled, or influenced by food—has helped to shape and transform societies around the world. The first civilizations were built on barley and wheat in the Near East, millet and rice in Asia, and corn and potatoes in the Americas. Why farming created a strictly ordered social hierarchy in contrast to the loose egalitarianism of hunter-gatherers is, as Tom Standage reveals, as interesting as the details of the complex cultures that emerged, eventually interconnected by commerce. Trade in exotic spices in particular spawned the age of exploration and the colonization of the New World. Food's influence over the course of history has been just as prevalent in modern times. In the late eighteenth century, Britain's solution to food shortages was to industrialize and import food rather than grow it. Food helped to determine the outcome of wars: Napoleon's rise and fall was intimately connected with his ability to feed his vast armies. In the twentieth century, Communist leaders employed food as an ideological weapon, resulting in the death by starvation of millions in the Soviet Union and China. And today the foods we choose in the supermarket connect us to global debates about trade, development, the environment, and the adoption of new technologies. Encompassing many fields, from genetics and archaeology to anthropology and economics—and invoking food as a special form of technology—An Edible History of Humanity is a fully satisfying discourse on the sweep of human history.

    There has been a marked increase in the adoption of PHP, most notably in the beginning to intermediate levels. PHP now boasts over 30% of the server side scripting market (Source: php.weblogs.com).The previous edition sold over 17,000 copies exclusively through Sitepoint.com alone. With the release of PHP 5, SitePoint have updated this bestseller to reflect best practice web development using PHP 5 and MySQL 4.The 3rd Edition includes more code examples and also a new bonus chapter on structured PHP Programming which introduces techniques for organizing real world PHP applications to avoid code duplication and ensure code is manageable and maintainable. The chapter introduces features like include files, user-defined function libraries and constants, which are combined to produce a fully functional access control system suitable for use on any PHP Website.

    We have in particular given a large place to the rôle and to the history of the Church which dominates all this period, and which has been ordinarily so neglected in our schoolbooks, and have sought to make clear how France obtained in the thirteenth century a sort of political and intellectual hegemony in Europe. We hope those who read will understand what were the great ideas and directive tendencies which determined the historical evolution of the Middle Ages. We have always kept in mind in writing the conclusion to which we were advancing." - Charles Bémont & Gabriel MonodContents: The Roman Empire at the End of the Fourth Century. The Barbarians. The Germanic Invasions – The Vandals, The Visigoths, and the Huns (376-476). The Germanic Invasions – The Ostrogoths. The Germanic Invasions – The Barbarians in Gaul – Clovis. The Frankish Kingdom from 511 to 639. Institutions of Gaul after the Invasions. The Roman Empire of the East in the Sixth Century. The Last Invasions and the Papacy – The Lombards and Gregory the Great – The Anglo-Saxons and Monasticism. The Arabs – Mohammed. Arabian Empire – Conquests and Civilization. The Fainéant Kings – Foundation of the Carolingian Dynasty – Charlemagne. Empire of the Franks – Carolingian Customs and Institutions. The Carolingian Decadence, 814-888. The Last Carolingians – Invasions of the Saracens, Hungarians, and Norsemen – Origin of Feudalism. The Feudal System. Germany and Italy (888-1056). Emperor and Pope – Church Reform – Gregory VII. The Guelfs and Hohenstaufen – Alexander III. and Frederick I. Barbarossa. End of the Hohenstaufen – Victory of the Papacy over the Empire. The Christian and Mussulman Orient from the Seventh to the Eleventh Century. The Crusades. The Country Districts and Cities of France - Emancipation of Peasants and Bourgeois. French Royalty (987-1154). French Royalty (1154-1270). Institutions of Capetian Royalty. England from the Ninth to the Thirteenth Century. Continental Europe. The Roman Church in the Thirteenth Century. The Church and Heresies. Christian and Feudal Civilization – Instruction And Sciences – Literature And Arts – Worship. General Summary.

    

    Their discussion ranges from the history of the field's intellectual foundations to the most recent developments and applications.Reinforcement learning, one of the most active research areas in artificial intelligence, is a computational approach to learning whereby an agent tries to maximize the total amount of reward it receives when interacting with a complex, uncertain environment. In Reinforcement Learning, Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto provide a clear and simple account of the key ideas and algorithms of reinforcement learning. Their discussion ranges from the history of the field's intellectual foundations to the most recent developments and applications. The only necessary mathematical background is familiarity with elementary concepts of probability.The book is divided into three parts. Part I defines the reinforcement learning problem in terms of Markov decision processes. Part II provides basic solution methods: dynamic programming, Monte Carlo methods, and temporal-difference learning. Part III presents a unified view of the solution methods and incorporates artificial neural networks, eligibility traces, and planning; the two final chapters present case studies and consider the future of reinforcement learning.

    Games can not only stem boredom and decrease turnover, but also enhancee collaboration and encourage creative leadership. Games require extraordinary teamwork, elaborate data analysis and strategy, recruitment and retention of top players, and quick decision making. Recreating some elements of games - such as positioning tasks within stories, creating internal economies, and implementing participant-driven communication systems - can not only boost employee engagement but overall productivity.Of course, the strong psychological power of games can have both positive and negative consequences for the workplace. That's why it's important to put them into practice correctly from the beginning - and Reeves and Read explain how by showing which good design principles are a powerful antidote to the addictive and stress-inducing potential of games. Supported by specific case studies and years of research, Total Engagement will completely change the way you view both work and play.