Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

The information age is upon us, baffling us with thousands of complicated state-of-the-art technologies. To help make sense of the computer age, David Macaulay brings us The New Way Things Work. This completely updated and expanded edition describes twelve new machines and includes more than seventy new pages detailing the latest innovations. With an entirely new section that guides us through the complicated... (more)

Building Machines and What They Do

by Derek Radford

How does a cement truck mix cement? How are garbage trucks emptied? These are just two of the questions curious children are likely to ask about the vehicles they see around them every day. Fortunately, for those of us who don't know everything (or anything!) about such topics, Dereck Radford has assembled an impressive variety of facts about building machines. The brief text and realistically rendered... (more)

Whitechapel Gods

by S. M. Peters

A thrilling new Steampunk fantasy from a talented debut author TWO GODS-ONE CHANCE FOR MANKIND In Victorian London, the Whitechapel section is a mechanized, steam-driven hell, cut off and ruled by two mysterious, mechanical gods-Mama Engine and Grandfather Clock. Some years have passed since the Great Uprising, when humans rose up to fight against the machines, but a few brave veterans of the Uprising have... (more)

I Know You Got Soul

by Jeremy Clarkson

Technology Matters: Questions to Live With

Technology Matters: Questions to Live With

by David E. Nye

Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2006 Technology matters, writes David Nye, because it is inseparable from being human. We have used tools for more than 100,000 years, and their central purpose has not always been to provide necessities. People excel at using old tools to solve new problems and at inventing new tools for more elegant solutions to old tasks. Perhaps this is because we are intimate with... (more)

Home Machinists Handbook

by Doug Briney

Here's everything the do-it-yourselfer needs to set up, and operate a handy-man's machine shop. Areas covered range from shop requirements and proper lighting to buying, using, and storing tools.

The Matrix Screenplay

by The Wachowski Brothers

Leviathan

by Scott Westerfield

Sex in the System: Stories of Erotic Futures, Technological Stimulation, and the Sensual Life of Machines

Sex in the System: Stories of Erotic Futures, Technological Stimulation, and the Sensual Life of Machines

by Cecilia Tan

Every form of technology humankind has invented has been co-opted for two uses: warfare and getting off. Electricity, internal combustion, the telephone, the Internet — there's no reason to think this trend will stop as we move into the future of nanotechnology, neuroscience, and space travel. However, whether the future is a Gernsbackian vision of flying cars and cloud cities, or a gritty gray cyberpunk world,... (more)

Deathbird Stories

by Harlan Ellison

Harlan Ellison's masterwork of myth and terror as he seduces all innocence on a mind-freezing odyssey into the darkest reaches of mortal terror and the most dazzling heights of Olympian hell in his finest collection. Deathbird Stories is a collection of 19 of Harlan Ellison's best stories, including Edgar and Hugo winners, originally published between 1960 and 1974. The collection contains some of Ellison's... (more)

Player Piano

by Kurt Vonnegut

Vonnegut's first novel spins the chilling tale of engineer Paul Proteus, who must find a way to live in a world dominated by a super computer and run completely by machines. His rebellion is a wildly funny, darkly satirical look at modern society.

Society of Mind

by Marvin Minsky

Marvin Minsky -- one of the fathers of computer science and cofounder of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT -- gives a revolutionary answer to the age-old question: "How does the mind work?" Minsky brilliantly portrays the mind as a "society" of tiny components that are themselves mindless. Mirroring his theory, Minsky boldly casts The Society of Mind as an intellectual puzzle whose pieces are... (more)

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Tags: machines

The New Way Things Work

by David MacAulay