Book picks similar to
Spacelab: Research in Earth Orbit by David Shapland
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aerospace
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Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down
J.E. Gordon - 1978
Gordon strips engineering of its confusing technical terms, communicating its founding principles in accessible, witty prose.For anyone who has ever wondered why suspension bridges don't collapse under eight lanes of traffic, how dams hold back--or give way under--thousands of gallons of water, or what principles guide the design of a skyscraper, a bias-cut dress, or a kangaroo, this book will ease your anxiety and answer your questions.Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down is an informal explanation of the basic forces that hold together the ordinary and essential things of this world--from buildings and bodies to flying aircraft and eggshells. In a style that combines wit, a masterful command of his subject, and an encyclopedic range of reference, Gordon includes such chapters as "How to Design a Worm" and "The Advantage of Being a Beam," offering humorous insights in human and natural creation.Architects and engineers will appreciate the clear and cogent explanations of the concepts of stress, shear, torsion, fracture, and compression. If you're building a house, a sailboat, or a catapult, here is a handy tool for understanding the mechanics of joinery, floors, ceilings, hulls, masts--or flying buttresses.Without jargon or oversimplification, Structures opens up the marvels of technology to anyone interested in the foundations of our everyday lives.
The Thinking Pilot's Flight Manual: Or, How to Survive Flying Little Airplanes and Have a Ball Doing It
Rick Durden - 2012
The Thinking Pilot guides you deeply into topics that weren't taught in flight training-everything from how to really do a preflight, through keeping your passengers happy, scud running, precautionary landings, and how to survive a crash. It includes a detailed introduction to flying floats, skis, aerobatics, and classic airplanes; probes some of aviation's dirty little secrets, explodes myths, and presents the best, most succinct guide to flying tailwheel airplanes ever written. Rick Durden was once described as aviation's Renaissance Man. He is an Airline Transport-rated pilot with experience in some 200 types of airplanes, a practicing aviation attorney who has been involved in hundreds of aircraft accident cases, writer, aviation magazine editor, safety counselor, flight instructor, volunteer pilot in remote areas of the U.S. and Central America, and has been the executive director of a nonprofit conservation organization making use of aircraft and volunteer pilots throughout much of North America.
Foundations of Analog and Digital Electronic Circuits
Anant Agarwal - 2005
It will introduce a new way of looking not only at the treatment of circuits, but also at the treatment of introductory coursework in engineering in general. Using the concept of ''abstraction, '' the book attempts to form a bridge between the world of physics and the world of large computer systems. In particular, it attempts to unify electrical engineering and computer science as the art of creating and exploiting successive abstractions to manage the complexity of building useful electrical systems. Computer systems are simply one type of electrical systems
Asimov on Numbers
Isaac Asimov - 1978
From man's first act of counting to higher mathematics, from the smallest living creature to the dazzling reaches of outer space, Asimov is a master at "explaining complex material better than any other living person." (The New York Times) You'll learn: HOW to make a trillion seem small; WHY imaginary numbers are real; THE real size of the universe - in photons; WHY the zero isn't "good for nothing;" AND many other marvelous discoveries, in ASIMOV ON NUMBERS.
Privacy in the Age of Big Data: Recognizing Threats, Defending Your Rights, and Protecting Your Family
Theresa M. Payton - 2014
The devices we use to get just-in-time coupons, directions when we're lost, and maintain connections with loved ones no matter how far away they are, also invade our privacy in ways we might not even be aware of. Our devices send and collect data about us whenever we use them, but that data is not safeguarded the way we assume it would be. Privacy is complex and personal. Many of us do not know the full extent to which data is collected, stored, aggregated, and used. As recent revelations indicate, we are subject to a level of data collection and surveillance never before imaginable. While some of these methods may, in fact, protect us and provide us with information and services we deem to be helpful and desired, others can turn out to be insidious and over-arching. Privacy in the Age of Big Data highlights the many positive outcomes of digital surveillance and data collection while also outlining those forms of data collection to which we may not consent, and of which we are likely unaware. Payton and Claypoole skillfully introduce readers to the many ways we are 'watched, ' and how to adjust our behaviors and activities to recapture our privacy. The authors suggest the tools, behavior changes, and political actions we can take to regain data and identity security. Anyone who uses digital devices will want to read this book for its clear and no-nonsense approach to the world of big data and what it means for all of us.
In the Shadow of the Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965-1969
Francis French - 2007
While describing awe-inspiring technical achievements, the authors go beyond the missions and the competition of the space race to focus on the people who made it all possible. Their book explores the inspirations, ambitions, personalities, and experiences of the select few whose driving ambition was to fly to the moon. Drawing on interviews with astronauts, cosmonauts, their families, technicians, and scientists, as well as rarely seen Soviet and American government documents, the authors craft a remarkable story of the golden age of spaceflight as both an intimate human experience and a rollicking global adventure. From the Gemini flights to the Soyuz space program to the earliest Apollo missions, including the legendary first moon landing, their book draws a richly detailed picture of the space race as an endeavor equally endowed with personal meaning and political significance.
More Programming Pearls: Confessions of a Coder
Jon L. Bentley - 1988
These techniques deal with real programs and they are realistically illustrated, using the C and Awk languages. Bentley also provides the reader with some tricks of the programmer's trade, like a collection of rules of thumb and hints for finding simple solutions to hard problems.These essays also originally appeared in the author's column in Communication of the ACM, and have been substantially revised, incorporating new sections, problems, and reader comments.
The Rickover Effect: How One Man Made a Difference
Theodore Rockwell - 1992
Hyman G. Rickover made nuclear power a reality. Building on the scientific breakthroughs of the atomic bomb project, he created the nuclear Navy almost overnight, when nearly everyone else thought it was a pipe dream, and built the world's first commercial atomic power station. He did most of this in a single decade.Rickover's incredible ability to get things done won his program wide public acclaim and personal honors that included presidential citations, honorary doctoral degrees, and congressional gold medals. Despite all this, Rickover was the subject of bitter controversy and was twice passed over for promotions. In 1953 he was saved from involuntary retirement only through congressional intervention. Nearly forty years later, when he was fired as a four-star admiral, all three living American ex-presidents attended his post-retirement party.Now, for the first time, one of Rickover's close associates tells what it was like to be with this remarkable man day and night as he accomplished his miracles, and why he was bitterly opposed by so many powerful people. Theodore Rockwell, the admiral's long time technical director, takes the reader behind the zirconium curtain that protected the program to give an inside account of those turbulent times. Using on-the-spot anecdotes and little-known documents, he explores Rickover's methods and relationships with others to help us understand his strengths and weaknesses.The author describes Rickover's successes beginning right after World War II in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. His account includes the first submarine voyage from Pearl Harbor to England to the North Pole, the continuously submerged round-the-world journey of the USS Triton, and the buildup of the U.S. nuclear fleet and the civilian nuclear power industry.This candid, insightful portrait could only have been written by a key player. The Rickover Effect makes and important contribution to the understanding to one of this century's most elusive personalities.
In Code: A Mathematical Journey
Sarah Flannery - 2000
The following day, her story began appearing in Irish papers and soon after was splashed across the front page of the London Times, complete with a photo of Sarah and a caption calling her "brilliant." Just sixteen, she was a mathematician with an international reputation. IN CODE is a heartwarming story that will have readers cheering Sarah on. Originally published in England and cowritten with her mathematician father, David Flannery, IN CODE is "a wonderfully moving story about the thrill of the mathematical chase" (Nature) and "a paean to intellectual adventure" (Times Educational Supplement). A memoir in mathematics, it is all about how a girl next door, nurtured by her family, moved from the simple math puzzles that were the staple of dinnertime conversation to prime numbers, the Sieve of Eratosthenes, Fermat's Little Theorem, googols-and finally into her breathtaking algorithm. Parallel with each step is a modest girl's own self-discovery-her values, her burning curiosity, the joy of persistence, and, above all, her love for her family.
A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon
Neil Sheehan - 2009
Here is the never-before-told story of the nuclear arms race that changed history-and of the visionary American Air Force officer Bernard Schriever, who led the high-stakes effort. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War is a masterly work about Schriever's quests to prevent the Soviet Union from acquiring nuclear superiority, to penetrate and exploit space for America, and to build the first weapons meant to deter an atomic holocaust rather than to be fired in anger. Sheehan melds biography and history, politics and science, to create a sweeping narrative that transports the reader back and forth from individual drama to world stage. The narrative takes us from Schriever's boyhood in Texas as a six-year-old immigrant from Germany in 1917 through his apprenticeship in the open-cockpit biplanes of the Army Air Corps in the 1930s and his participation in battles against the Japanese in the South Pacific during the Second World War. On his return, he finds a new postwar bipolar universe dominated by the antagonism between the United States and the Soviet Union. Inspired by his technological vision, Schriever sets out in 1954 to create the one class of weapons that can enforce peace with the Russians-intercontinental ballistic missiles that are unstoppable and can destroy the Soviet Union in thirty minutes. In the course of his crusade, he encounters allies and enemies among some of the most intriguing figures of the century: John von Neumann, the Hungarian-born mathematician and mathematical physicist, who was second in genius only to Einstein; Colonel Edward Hall, who created the ultimate ICBM in the Minuteman missile, and his brother, Theodore Hall, who spied for the Russians at Los Alamos and hastened their acquisition of the atomic bomb; Curtis LeMay, the bomber general who tried to exile Schriever and who lost his grip on reality, amassing enough nuclear weapons in his Strategic Air Command to destroy the entire Northern Hemisphere; and Hitler's former rocket maker, Wernher von Braun, who along with a colorful, riding-crop-wielding Army general named John Medaris tried to steal the ICBM program. The most powerful men on earth are also put into astonishing relief: Joseph Stalin, the cruel, paranoid Soviet dictator who spurred his own scientists to build him the atomic bomb with threats of death; Dwight Eisenhower, who backed the ICBM program just in time to save it from the bureaucrats; Nikita Khrushchev, who brought the world to the edge of nuclear catastrophe during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and John Kennedy, who saved it. Schriever and his comrades endured the heartbreak of watching missiles explode on the launching pads at Cape Canaveral and savored the triumph of seeing them soar into space. In the end, they accomplished more than achieving a fiery peace in a cold war. Their missiles became the vehicles that opened space for America.
Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight
David A. Mindell - 2008
Neil Armstrong responded by switching off the automatic mode and taking direct control. He stopped monitoring the computer and began flying the spacecraft, relying on skill to land it and earning praise for a triumph of human over machine. In Digital Apollo, engineer-historian David Mindell takes this famous moment as a starting point for an exploration of the relationship between humans and computers in the Apollo program. In each of the six Apollo landings, the astronaut in command seized control from the computer and landed with his hand on the stick. Mindell recounts the story of astronauts' desire to control their spacecraft in parallel with the history of the Apollo Guidance Computer. From the early days of aviation through the birth of spaceflight, test pilots and astronauts sought to be more than "spam in a can" despite the automatic controls, digital computers, and software developed by engineers.Digital Apollo examines the design and execution of each of the six Apollo moon landings, drawing on transcripts and data telemetry from the flights, astronaut interviews, and NASA's extensive archives. Mindell's exploration of how human pilots and automated systems worked together to achieve the ultimate in flight -- a lunar landing -- traces and reframes the debate over the future of humans and automation in space. The results have implications for any venture in which human roles seem threatened by automated systems, whether it is the work at our desktops or the future of exploration.
Introduction to Linear Algebra
Gilbert Strang - 1993
Topics covered include matrix multiplication, row reduction, matrix inverse, orthogonality and computation. The self-teaching book is loaded with examples and graphics and provides a wide array of probing problems, accompanying solutions, and a glossary. Chapter 1: Introduction to Vectors; Chapter 2: Solving Linear Equations; Chapter 3: Vector Spaces and Subspaces; Chapter 4: Orthogonality; Chapter 5: Determinants; Chapter 6: Eigenvalues and Eigenvectors; Chapter 7: Linear Transformations; Chapter 8: Applications; Chapter 9: Numerical Linear Algebra; Chapter 10: Complex Vectors and Matrices; Solutions to Selected Exercises; Final Exam. Matrix Factorizations. Conceptual Questions for Review. Glossary: A Dictionary for Linear Algebra Index Teaching Codes Linear Algebra in a Nutshell.
Collected Poems
Stéphane Mallarmé - 1995
Leader of the Symbolist movement, he exerted a powerful influence on modern literature and thought, which can be traced in the works of Paul Valéry, W.B. Yeats, and Jacques Derrida. From his early twenties until the time of his death, Mallarmé produced poems of astonishing originality and beauty, many of which have become classics.In the Collected Poems, Henry Weinfield brings the oeuvre of this European master to life for an English-speaking audience, essentially for the first time. All the poems that the author chose to retain are here, superbly rendered by Weinfield in a translation that comes remarkably close to Mallarmé's own voice. Weinfield conveys not simply the meaning but the spirit and music of the French originals, which appear en face.Whether writing in verse or prose, or inventing an altogether new genre—as he did in the amazing "Coup de Dés"—Mallarmé was a poet of both supreme artistry and great difficulty. To illuminate Mallarmé's poetry for twentieth-century readers, Weinfield provides an extensive commentary that is itself an important work of criticism. He sets each poem in the context of the work as a whole and defines the poems' major symbols. Also included are an introduction and a bibliography.Publication of this collection is a major literary event in the English-speaking world: here at last is the work of a major figure, masterfully translated.
