Search results for ""RAND""

In Accounts and Drawings from Underground, published in 2015, renowned artist William Kentridge and scholar Rosalind C. Morris brought us an unprecedented collaboration, taking pages of the 1906 Cash Book of the East Rand Proprietary Mines Corporation in South Africa and transforming them into something entirely new. While Kentridge contributed breathtaking landscape drawings in response to the transient terrain mining created, Morris plumbed the text of the cash book to generate a unique narrative account. Now, they revisit those ruined mines, with a visual and verbal addendum that provides an account of the ongoing metamorphosis of the world that gold mines created. Kentridge works on the threshold between the visible and the invisible, while Morris mines the unsaid in order to make it understandable. Together they’ve created a landmark book that chronicles the exploitation of African communities and sheds further light on global Black history. With fifteen stunning new color drawings by Kentridge and an additional coda, this revised edition of Accounts and Drawings from Underground continues its remarkable documentation of the stories of migrant laborers and the flows of capital and desire, providing us with a palpable sense of a vanished world.

Read more less

Dieses Buch zeichnet Geschichte und Denkansätze des Wiener Kreises nach, des Gelehrtenzirkels, der aus dem Geistesleben des 20. Jahrhunderts nicht wegzudenken ist. Anknüpfend an Russell und Einstein versucht ein Team von Mathematikern, Naturwissenschaftlern und Philosophen die Grundlagen einer wissenschaftlichen Weltauffassung zu legen, im scharfen Gegenwind der reaktionären Politik der Zwischenkriegsjahre. Anschaulich, einfach und einprägsam stellt Karl Sigmund eine der spannendsten Episoden der radikalen Moderne dar - einer Episode, die vom Nationalsozialismus zerstört wurde, aber im angelsächsischen Exil reiche Früchte trug. Viele der damals angerissenen Fragen haben heute noch ihre Auswirkungen: Es führt eine Linie von der symbolischen Logik Carnaps und Gödels zur Informatik, und die wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung ist so selbstverständlich geworden, dass wir sie kaum mehr wahrnehmen. Ein Buch für alle an der Kulturgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts Interessierten, das naturwissenschaftlich und geisteswissenschaftlich orientierte Leserinnen und Leser in gleichem Maß anspricht. Die zweite Auflage enthält viel neues Material , etwa über die sensationell spannende Flucht Otto Neuraths über den Ärmelkanal, oder über die Laufbahnen von Friedrich Adler und Otto Pölzl (der„Leibpsychiater“), die den Wiener Kreis über Jahrzehnte begleiteten. Auch sind wichtige Seiten über Einstein, Turing und Brouwer dazugekommen. Douglas Hofstadter, der Autor von "Gödel, Escher, Bach", hat ein Nachwort zu dieser Neuauflage verfasst.

Read more less

Over the last twenty years, William Kentridge has built a world-wide reputation as a contemporary artist, best known for his series of ten animated films created from charcoal drawings. The films introduced a significant character in contemporary fiction: Soho Eckstein, a Highveld mining magnate and Kentridge's alter ego. In The Soho Chronicles, Kentridge's brother, Matthew, shares a never-before-seen perspective on both William and Soho that sheds new light on the creator and his alter ego. Richly illustrated, the book includes a special feature that connects with smartphones and tablets. In Accounts and Drawings from Underground, William Kentridge and Rosalind C. Morris bring us an unprecedented collaboration using the pages of the 1906 Cash Book of the East Rand Proprietary Mines Corporation. Kentridge contributes forty landscape drawings in response to the transient terrain mining, while Morris plumbs the text of the cash book to generate a unique narrative account, drawing together the stories of migrant laborers and charting the flows of capital and desire.

Read more less

Why was the Navy ready to clear the skies over the Persian Gulf, yet surprised by the mines laid under it? Why is it that the Army is always prepared for war in Europe, but was caught off guard in Korea and Vietname? And why is the Air Force indifferent to "Star Wars"?In The Masks of War Carl H. Builder asks what motives lie behind the puzzling and often contradictory behavior of America's militay forces. The answer, he finds, has little to do with what party controls the White House or who writes the budget. Far more powerful-and glacially resistant to change-are the entrenched institutions and distinct "personalities" of the three armed services themselves.The Masks of War explains why things sometimes go wrong for the American military. It also explains why things will always go wrong for the military reformers. Changes in the military's strategic thinking have come only in the wake of full-blown disaster-Pearl Harbor, for instance. Today's nuclear world can't afford such lessons.

Read more less

Literature can be used to disseminate ideas with devastating real-life consequences. In How Bad Writing Destroyed the World, Adam Weiner spans decades and continents to reveal the surprising connections between the 2008-2009 financial crisis and a relatively unknown nineteenth-century Russian author. A congressional investigation placed the blame for the financial crisis on Alan Greenspan and his deregulatory policies—his attempts, in essence, to put Ayn Rand’s Objectivism into practice. Though developed most famously in Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Objectivism sprouted from the Rational Egoism of Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to be Done? (1863), an enormously influential Russian novel decried by the likes of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vladimir Nabokov for its destructive radical ethics. In tracing the origins of Greenspan’s ruinous ideology, How Bad Writing Destroyed the World combines literary and intellectual history to uncover the danger of hawking “the virtues of selfishness,” even in fiction.

Read more less

This book examines the writings of the American novelist Ayn Rand, especially The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), which Rand considered her definitive statement about the need for an unregulated free market in which superior humans could fully realize themselves by living for no-one but themselves. It explores Rand’s conception of American identity, which exalted individualism and capitalism, and her solution for saving the modern American nation, which she believed was losing the spirit of its 18th- and 19th-century founders and frontiersmen, having been degraded morally and economically by the rampant socialism of the mid-20th-century world. Derek Offord crucially goes on to analyse how Rand’s writings functioned as a vehicle in which she, a Russian-Jewish writer born in St Petersburg in 1905, engaged with ideas that had long animated the Russian intelligentsia. Her conception of human nature and of a utopian community capable of satisfying its needs; her reversal of conventional valuations of self-sacrifice and selfishness; her division of humans into an extraordinary minority and the ordinary mass; her comparison of competing civilizations – in all these areas, Offord argues that Rand drew on Russian debates and transposed them to a different context. Even the type of novel she writes, the novel of ideas, is informed by the polemical methods and habits of the Russian intelligentsia. The book concludes that her search for a brave new world continues to have topicality in the 21st century, with its populist critiques of liberal democracies and acrimonious debates about countries’ moral, social, and economic priorities and their identities, inequalities, and social tensions.

Read more less

Before the Computer fully explores the data processing industry in the United States from its nineteenth-century inception down to the period when the computer became its primary tool. As James Cortada describes what was once called the "office appliance industry," he challenges our view of the digital computer as a revolutionary technology. Cortada interprets reliance on computers as a development within an important segment of the American economy that was earlier represented largely by such instruments as typewriters, tabulating machines, adding machines, and calculators. He also describes how many of the practices of the office appliance industry evolved into those of the computer world. Drawing on previously unavailable industry archives, the author adds to our understanding of IBM's early history and offers short corporate histories of firms that include NCR, Burroughs, and Remington Rand. Focusing on the United States but also including comparative material on Europe and Asia, Before the Computer will be a unique source of knowledge about the companies that built office equipment and their enormous impact on economic life. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Read more less

Die Ränder der Welt sind mehr als die Kante am Rande einer scheibenförmigen Welt. Sie sind die Räume am Rande der Wahrnehmung, die der Mensch auf der Basis noch so geringen Wissens phantasievoll gestaltet. In der Vorstellungswelt der Griechen von Homer bis zu Alexander dem Großen spielten diese Ränder eine bedeutende Rolle. Auch noch als die Erde nicht mehr als Scheibe begriffen wurde, blieben sie als Ränder der Oikumene, der bewohnten und bekannten Welt, bestehen. Sie waren Projektionsflächen für Ängste und Wünsche und Reflexionsräume, in denen die Griechen über sich selbst und ihre Gesellschaft nachdachten. Was den Kosmos, die bewohnte und bekannte Welt, die griechische Kultur und das Menschsein für die Griechen ausmachte, zeigt sich besonders deutlich in ihren Vorstellungen von den Rändern.

Read more less