Flynn's Log 5: Quest for Zen


Book Description

Alone in his digital world, Flynn searches for a way to forget what he’s lost. His friends trapped in the “old world,” Flynn is alive in Invivitas! But whose side is he on? While Zana is in the physical world trying to force all humans to enter Invivitas, Flynn is living in the digital world and runs into new trouble. Can his friends save Flynn? Will he survive or will he encounter digital death? About the Flynn's Log series: In the near future, video games begin to change and evolve. Random bits of data evolve to create a virtual intelligence that takes over the digital world. A digital crisis is born, bringing the real world to a halt. The only person who can save the world is Flynn, but he needs help from his friends, the Hackers.




Flynn's Log 5


Book Description

"His friends trapped in the "old world," Flyn is alive in Invivitas! But whose side is he on? While Zana is in the physical world trying to force all humans to enter Invivitas, Flynn is living in the digital world and runs into new trouble. Can his friends save Flynn? Will he survive or will he encounter digital death?"--Page 4 of cover.




Will it Fly?


Book Description

The author shares a series of tests along with insights from entrepreneurs on how to investigate the viability of a new business idea before trying to launch the business.




Flynn's Log 4: Offline


Book Description

Trapped in a Digital World! Flynn is in two places at once! His intelligence is trapped in the game, unable to contact the real world. At the same time, Zana, the digital intelligence from the game, is using Flynn's body to carry out her plan to convert everyone in the real world to digital intelligence: the ultimate form of life. Elle is in the real world facing real danger! Elle needs to stop Zana, but she is on her own and must make a decision that will impact her friends forever. About the Flynn's Log series: In the near future, video games begin to change and evolve. Random bits of data evolve to create a virtual intelligence that takes over the digital world. A digital crisis is born, bringing the real world to a halt. The only person who can save the world is Flynn, but he needs help from his friends, the Hackers.




Tracing Back the Radiance


Book Description

Chinul (1158–1210) was the founder of the Korean tradition of Zen. He provides one of the most lucid and accessible accounts of Zen practice and meditation to be found anywhere in East Asian literature. Tracing Back the Radiance, an abridgment of Buswell’s Korean Approach to Zen: The Collected Works of Chinul, combines an extensive introduction to Chinul’s life and thought with translations of three of his most representative works.




Bonfire


Book Description

Successful environmental lawyer Abby Williams is forced to confront her small-town past while investigating a high-profile corruption case back home.




The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind


Book Description

National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry




Eat Sleep Sit


Book Description

At the age of thirty, Kaoru Nonomura left his family, his girlfriend, and his job as a designer in Tokyo to undertake a year of ascetic training at Eiheiji, one of the most rigorous Zen training temples in Japan. This book is Nonomura's recollection of his experiences. He skillfully describes every aspect of training, including how to meditate, how to eat, how to wash, even how to use the toilet, in a way that is easy to understand no matter how familiar a reader is with Zen Buddhism. This first-person account also describes Nonomura's struggles in the face of beatings, hunger, exhaustion, fear, and loneliness, the comfort he draws from his friendships with the other trainees, and his quiet determination to give his life spiritual meaning. After writing Eat Sleep Sit, Kaoru Nonomura returned to his normal life as a designer, but his book has maintained its popularity in Japan, selling more than 100,000 copies since its first printing in 1996. Beautifully written, and offering fascinating insight into a culture of hardships that few people could endure, this is a deeply personal story that will appeal to all those with an interest in Zen Buddhism, as well as to anyone seeking spiritual growth.




The Little Zen Companion


Book Description

While it seeks neither to define Zen nor answer its most famous koan (a riddle unanswerable by conventional thinking, in this case the sound of one hand clapping), this bestselling little book with 437,000 copies in print possesses a maverick Zen spirit that points to a different way of looking at the world. With each page featuring a quote, phrase, story, koan, haiku, or poem, Zen Companion combines the feeling and format of a meditation book with 2,500 years of wisdom-from Lao-tzu and Groucho Marx, William Carlos Williams and The Little Prince, D. T. Suzuki and Walker Percy, the Buddha and the Bible, Einstein and Gertrude Stein. It's a celebration of intuition: "If a man wishes to be sure of the road he treads on, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark"-St. John the Cross. Individuality: "Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought."-Basho. Uncomplicated nature: "Among twenty snowy mountains/The only moving thing/Was the eye of the blackbird."-Wallace Stevens. Childlike spontaneity: "Goodnight stars. Goodnight air."-Margaret Wise Brown. Irreverent paradox: "Wakuan complained when he saw a picture of bearded Bodhidharma: 'Why hasn't that fellow a beard?'" And above all, the simple pleasure of life lived in the moment. "Chop wood, carry water."




The Coevolution


Book Description

Should digital technology be viewed as a new life form, sharing our ecosystem and coevolving with us? Are humans defining technology, or is technology defining humans? In this book, Edward Ashford Lee considers the case that we are less in control of the trajectory of technology than we think. It shapes us as much as we shape it, and it may be more defensible to think of technology as the result of a Darwinian coevolution than the result of top-down intelligent design. Richard Dawkins famously said that a chicken is an egg's way of making another egg. Is a human a computer's way of making another computer? To understand this question requires a deep dive into how evolution works, how humans are different from computers, and how the way technology develops resembles the emergence of a new life form on our planet. Lee presents the case for considering digital beings to be living, then offers counterarguments. What we humans do with our minds is more than computation, and what digital systems do—be teleported at the speed of light, backed up, and restored—may never be possible for humans. To believe that we are simply computations, he argues, is a “dataist” faith and scientifically indefensible. Digital beings depend on humans—and humans depend on digital beings. More likely than a planetary wipe-out of humanity is an ongoing, symbiotic coevolution of culture and technology.