From her pet glass-globed hermit crab Rodney to the Victorian era's Crystal Palace, Celeste Olalquiaga offers a meditative look at the origins of kitsch and what kitsch tells us about the conflicts between the real and the artificial, tradition and modernity, nostalgia and melancholy. Olalquiaga artfully traces this form to the mid-1800s and establishes kitsch as a sensibility ...(展开全部)

Continuing his exploration of the organization of complexity and the science of design, this new edition of Herbert Simon's classic work on artificial intelligence adds a chapter that sorts out the current themes and tools -- chaos, adaptive systems, genetic algorithms -- for analyzing complexity and complex systems.There are updates throughout the book as well. These take into...(展开全部)

In this highly original novel Slauerhoff (1898-1936) reprises major themes from his poetry (erotic obsession, nomadism, persecution and confused identity) within a more ambitious formal framework. The book interweaves three narratives, separated in time but linked by a common association with the 'forbidden kingdom' of China. The first of these is the brutal and bloody founding...(展开全部)

The nature of perception has long been a central question in philosophy. It is of crucial importance not just in the philosophy of mind, but also in epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of science. The essays in this 1992 volume not only offer fresh answers to some of the traditional problems of perception, but also examine the subject in light of contempor...(展开全部)

There were two Norman Conquests. John Julius Norwich is writing about the 'other' one, the conquest of Sicily. When on Christmas Day 1130, Roger de Hauteville had himself crowned first King of Sicily, the island entered a golden age. Norman and Italian, Greek and Arab, Lombard, Englishman and Jew all contributed to a culture that was as brilliant as it was cosmopolitan; to an i...(展开全部)

Winner of the 1983 National Book Award! "...a perfectly marvelous book about the Queen of Sciences, from which one will get a real feeling for what mathematicians do and who they are. The exposition is clear and full of wit and humor..." - The New Yorker (1983 National Book Award edition) Mathematics has been a human activity for thousands of years. Yet only a few people from t...(展开全部)

We tend to think of mathematics as uniquely rigorous, and of mathematicians as supremely smart. In his introduction to The Mathematical Experience, Gian-Carlo Rota notes that instead, "a mathematician's work is mostly a tangle of guesswork, analogy, wishful thinking and frustration, and proof ... is more often than not a way of making sure that our minds are not playing tricks....(展开全部)