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The BEAD Method of Fretboard Mastery
Robert, Luther Dietz Manufacturer: Lulu.com ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 1411657896 |
Book Description
The BEAD Method(TM) is a revolutionary new way to understand the logic behind the guitar fretboard. There are many methods that rely on patterns of the guitar but BEAD Guitar(TM) relies on the unique tuning pattern of the guitar neck itself. In contrast you are provided with a true roadmap of the entire guitar neck. This book provides a unifying theory for understanding fret-notes, scales, modes and chords. By using this method you will be enabled to quickly find any note, chord or scale from any position on the fretboard. This perfect bound edition is fully annotated and illustrated making this a great reference book for any guitarist's library.Customer Reviews:
I recommend this for any guitar player, new or established.......2007-09-17
Great System But The Book...............2007-07-16
The Rosetta Stone For Guitar.......2007-02-20
playing classical guitar.......2007-01-19
The Bead Method Has Merit.......2007-01-05
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The Science of Star Wars: An Astrophysicist's Independent Examination of Space Travel, Aliens, Planets, and Robots as Portrayed in the Star Wars Films and Books
Jeanne Cavelos Manufacturer: St. Martin's Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover Similar Items:
ASIN: 0312209584 |
Amazon.com
Jeanne Cavelos says, "Star Wars fueled my interest in space exploration and the possibility of alien life," leading her to a career in astrophysics. While these movies have inspired her, she admits that may not have been their intention.
In creating the part science fiction/part fantasy/part myth that is Star Wars, George Lucas did not seek to create a futuristic universe that agreed perfectly with our current understanding of science.... How realistic, how possible, is this galaxy far, far away?The answer when A New Hope first came out was "not at all." But a strange thing has happened in the years since Star Wars first came out. Science is beginning to catch up with George Lucas.
Cavelos looks at Lucas's planets, aliens, droids, technology, and Force with both rationality and affection. The droids R2-D2 and C-3P0, among others, become more interesting and almost credible after her consideration.
The element of Star Wars that is most true to science is the sense of wonder it calls forth, which has very little to do with how close it is to a possible future. Or, as Steve Grand, director of the Cyberlife Institute, said to Cavelos: "I never try to let scientific implausibility get in the way of a good story!" --Mary Ellen Curtin
Book Description
Customer Reviews:
Not so long or so far away, some of it could happen.......2005-02-06
STAR WARS COULD HAPPEN!!?.......2001-09-25
This book explores the possibility of rapid interstellar travel
and alien planets and extraterrestrial life and the even how to
build lightsabers and blasters with incredible detail. Cavelos
explains that such breaktroughs may or may not happen in a few
thousand years. Who knows what breaktroughs humanity will make?
We may not be at war with aliens or other civilizations and I
hope it won't happen. But I do hope that someday people will be
able to travel to other solar systems and galaxies as quickly
and easily as crossing our oceans. Cavelos gives interesting
detail on wormholes,warp drives,and even what it would be like
to travel at warp drive with the stars stretching into streaks
of light. That will be a very exciting time. I hope that galactic
travel and even intergalctic travel will be used for tourism as
well as exploration and colonization. People will travel to exotic planets and moons like Yavin 4,Endor,Hoth,Coruscant etc.
and even view our own galaxy from above as a glowing celestial
spiral. That would be a very exciting time!!Perhaps it
will happen in the next thousand years or so.
Very Good.......2000-10-18
Great Book.......2000-08-31
Feels like a guilty pleasure, but enjoyable and thoughtful.......2000-07-10
The author has different chapters on planets, lifeforms, spaceships and weapons, droids, and the Force. Each chapter looks at the subject as depicted in the various movies, and then speculates on how likely the subject is scientifically. She has an open-mind; even when the subject seems to be scientifically inaccurate, she writes diplomatically that it seems unexplained, or needs some explanation beyond our understanding.
For the most part, she is a good writer. However, the book is sprinkled with repeated lame jokes about wishing bad things unto Imperial stormtroopers. It's kind of funny the first time, but after that, it becomes silly.
Also, the section discussing the Force delves into a heavy dose of quantum mechanics. There are no equations or diagrams, but it is an extended discussion, albeit at a layperson's level.
Finally, the paperback version contains an update based on "The Phantom Menace."
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The Science of Star Wars : An Astrophysicist's Independent Examination of Space Travel, Aliens, Planets, and Robots as Portrayed in the Star Wars Films and Books
Jeanne Cavelos Manufacturer: St. Martin ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: B000MC2HGQ |
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The Science of Star Wars: An Astrophysicist's Independent Examination of Space Travel, Aliens, Planets and Robots As Portrayed in the Star Wars Films and Books
Jeanne Cavelos Manufacturer: Books on Tape ProductGroup: Book Binding: Audio Cassette ASIN: 0736645195 |
Customer Reviews:
Ever wonder just how plausible the SW Universe is?.......2000-06-13
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Roone: A Memoir
Roone Arledge Manufacturer: Harper Paperbacks ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback ASIN: 0060536012 Release Date: 2004-07-06 |
Book Description
Roone Arledge's extraordinary career of more than a half century mirrors the history of the television industry he helped create. Roone is the vivid, intimate account of his own rise to fame and power as the head of both ABC Sports and ABC News as well as an up-close-and- personal story of his era, peopled with friends and foes alike.
Customer Reviews:
Very Entertaining!.......2006-07-30
Spellbinding.......2005-08-25
Brought Back Memories.......2003-09-17
His work in building ABC Sports and News will live on for decades. Millions of people tune in every night to watch Peter Jennings' newscasts or to watch Monday Night Football or Nightline. All of it can be traced back to Arledge's innovation and this book details how it all happened.
What I liked best about his book is that he was able to delve into the personal curiosities of many television personalities but he does it without rancor. For example, Howard Cosell and Frank Reynolds were probably not the easiest people in the world to have working for you. This book delves into those challenges but still does it in a positive way and you come away with respect for everyone in the book.
It's a great read and also a great resource regarding the history of television.
A great book...too bad he wasn't here to promote it..........2003-08-09
Roone Remembers The Glory Days At ABC.......2003-07-10
The book is all about personalities: the executives, the on-air talent, the producers and directors -- Arledge seems to relish in the trials and triumphs of his dealings. Also, Arledge always mentions which restaurants in which negotiations occurred -- the food and the atmosphere rank as importantly as the people. His final scene in the book, a reunion of ABC teammates, is painted with details of a popular New York eatery.
As Arledge tells it, the process of people management and kicking the competition while doing it is the real fun. And when you get to hang out with Peter Jennings, Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer and even Sam Donaldson, it's always going to be interesting.
The book's second half takes a darker tone as bean-counting executives from Capital Cities buy ABC in the 1980s. The high-rolling days at ABC and other nets came to a close as leveraged buyouts gave investors the chance to own chunks of the Fifth Estate, and the heritage of ABC's Leonard Goldenson and CBS's Bill Paley quickly faded. It wasn't about broadcasting anymore, it was just about money. Having worked in local television during this time, I found much of Arledge's account to be familiar with my own career experiences.
Arledge doesn't spend much time describing the mood after Disney bought ABC in the mid 1990s, but it's clear that Disney was an immediate improvement over the CapCities reign.
Of course, Arledge fought cancer and other ailments late in life, and he died in late 2002 before the book hit shelves. For me, the book lacked much substance about his personal life, his faith or outside interests or accomplishments. True, his work impacted important stories involving U.S. and USSR relations, race relations in South Africa and other milestones. But, if his life was consumed by the TV biz, to the exclusion of family, other causes and loves, this story reads a bit like a tragedy. Broadcasting is a very exciting but always changing product; Arledge's lifelong accomplishments are fading daily into the new visions of management at ABC.
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Roone: A Memoir
Roone Arledge Manufacturer: HarperCollins ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback ASIN: B000OAB3BG |
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The Unicode Standard, Version 4.0
The Unicode Consortium , Joe Becker , Mark Davis , Michael Everson , Asmus Freytag , John Jenkins , Eric Muller , Lisa Moore , Michel Suignard , and Ken Whistler Manufacturer: Addison-Wesley Professional ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover Similar Items:
ASIN: 0321185781 |
Customer Reviews:
Essential reference for modern programming.......2004-03-30
The content of ISO standard 10646 (successor to 8-bit ISO 646), goes way beyond just a charcter set. It contains information critical to the correctness of any program that steps outside the English-language world, i.e. every program on the Internet, and many others sooner or later. This is the basis for correct handling of numerals (there's a lot more than 0 to 9), letters, and text. It's also the explanation for some program behaviors that might otherwise baffle a programmer, or at least a programmer with the wit to be baffled.
More than just crucial, the content of this standard is plain fun. Its snippets of information from every major world language give wonderful insight into how people express themselves. It drives home the delighful diversity of human language and experience. It's also a near-bottomless source of stump-your-friends trivia.
I admit, I'll never use every fact in this incredible assembly. I use a lot of the information, though, and I use it as the point of entry into every discussion of internationalization and localization of software.
New version of one of the most-used standards.......2003-10-13
Browse through the book just like you would in a bookstore or library. Print out parts of it or all of it for free if you want. Well, it is free if you don't count the cost of paper (about 1500 sheets or twice that for simplex printing), cost of a binder (or maybe two binders) and the time you would have to spend punching the holes.
If you are mainly or only interested in particular sections of the standard then printing only those sections may be a reasonable thing to do.
On the other hand the price is *very* reasonable for an 8½" × 11" hardbound book with 1,462 pages. If it's the sort of book you know you want for browsing and for reference then it is likely you will want it in this nicely bound copy.
Like the previously published versions of the Unicode standard, this book is a beautiful book that is useful to those who don't need or want to get into the technical details of character properties and rules for bi-directional display and other necessary rules for displaying the characters. But for the actual use of many characters you will have to consult other lists outside the Unicode book or files, e.g. dictionaries and grammars of various languages or explanations of symbols used in various fields of mathematics.
Language and writing systems are messy and inconsistant and handling them systematically and coherently cannot be made easy. Accordingly the rules and explanations in this standard are by necessity often long and involved and couched in technical language. It can't be avoided that, for example, one must sometimes distinguish carefully between _characters_, _glyphs_, _graphemes_, _grapheme clusters_, _ligatures_ and _digraphs_ and whether one character is a _canonical equivalent_ of another character or sequence of characters or a _compatibility equivalent_ of another character or sequence of characters or just similar to another character or sequence of characters.
The Unicode character set is still a work in progress. Version 4.0 may not even approach the half-way mark in encoding every character that has been used in normal text records by human beings for which a meaning is known. No-one has ever tried to produce a list of characters on this scale before. No-one yet knows how many distinct characters there are.
But 4.0 covers 96,382 characters from *almost* every script currently used for modern languages and from some ancient scripts as well including Ugaritic cuneiform, Cretan Linear B and the ancient Cypriot syllabary. (Sumerian/Akkadian cuneiform is being worked on and Egyptian hieroglyphics will eventually follow.)
Included are a plethora of technical symbol characters including mathematical characters, chess pieces, die faces, characters needed for modern western music notation, characters needed for Byzantine music notation, ornamental dingbats and so much more. All of it is now at the fingertips of every computer user -- that is if fonts that contain the characters are installed.
Finding fonts that display some of these characters is still a problem. :-(
But it would be a worse problem if these characters weren't assigned to a common character set. The past practice of numerous special fonts for various symbols and scripts which disagreed with one another on how the characters were encoded produced a horrible mess.
Large as it is, with 40% more pages than version 3.0, the book doesn't contain the whole standard. Increasingly as the standard has expanded tabular material has been dropped from the printed volumes and replaced with references to data files available on the website or on the CD that comes with the book.
The end of section 3.2 specifies six files found as Annexes on the website and on the CD which "are essential parts of version 4.0" including an explanation of the bidirectional algorithm which appeared in the printed text for earlier releases. And there are many mentions in the printed standard of other files available on the CD or website. A binder containing printouts of this material is necessary if you want a truly complete hardcopy of the entire 4.0 standard.
Unfortunately the 4.0 HTML files are carelessly laid down on the CD with external links pointing to files on the Unicode website and not to the corresponding files on the CD. Graphics are sometimes missing though the only file I think this matters with is StandardizedVariants.html which has a number of variant character images. (The data in this short file should have been in the book).
If you work online you probably won't notice anything wrong but you also are likely not to notice that after clicking on a link you are viewing a file from the Unicode website instead of a file on the CD. That may matter in the future if you need to reference a 4.0 file and don't observe that the file you are actually looking at is from the website and is a "latest version" file that has been updated beyond 4.0. If you are working offline you can avoid this, but it is annoying to have to manually search for the file by name because the link fails.
Also, although the Readme.txt file on the CD mentions "mapping tables" and files with "the extension .UNI", these useful conversion tables which were included on the CD's with previous releases are missing on the 4.0 CD. But they are available on the website.
This is a minor caveat. I suspect most people will use the website in any case rather than the CD.
An indispensable resource.......2003-09-25
All the Languages of Man.......2003-09-22
But chances are, when you deal with Unicode, you only deal with a subset. Often only a small subset at that, unless you are using Chinese/Japanese. Typically you work with ascii and the codes for your spoken language if that is not a Western European language. Very few of us deal with much more than this.
Which illustrates the appeal of the book. The Big Picture. ALL of Unicode. The breadth is stunning. It shows the written form of every major spoken language and many minor ones. Has the pictograms for Chinese [of course]. But also the symbols for Khmer, Canadian Aboriginal, Tamil, Syraic, et cetera, et cetera. Thumbing through this, you may encounter languages that you did not even know existed. It is one thing to say that we live in a multilingual world. But it is another to actually see it expressed comprehensively at the most basic level.
There are two audiences for this book. The first is any computer person who has to deal with issues of internationalisation.
But another audience is every Department of Languages or Cultural Anthropology in a university. If this describes your background, then you should know that you do not need facility in computing to appreciate the significance of this book. You can use it as a standard reference, akin to the Oxford English Dictionary vis-a-vis the English language. Look, ignore the computer stuff in the text. Yes, you can do this. The book groups related languages into common chapters. The explanatory text is lucid and the graphics for the languages lets you easily cross compare. Of course, at a higher level of meaning like sentences, you will need specialised texts in those languages. But to understand a language, you need to start at its letters or pictograms.
Think of this book as an index into all the languages of man.
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The Unicode Standard Version 4.0
THE UNICODE CONSORTIUM Manufacturer: Addison-Wesley Professional ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback ASIN: B000OUHR7K |
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Unicode Standard, Version 4.0
* Manufacturer: ADDISON WESLEY PROF ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback ASIN: B000K39TU4 |
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