Terra Forma


Book Description

Charting the exploration of an unknown world—our own—with a new cartography of living things rather than space available for conquest or colonization. This book charts the exploration of an unknown world: our own. Just as Renaissance travelers set out to map the terra incognito of the New World, the mapmakers of Terra Forma have set out to rediscover the world that we think we know. They do this with a new kind of cartography that maps living things rather than space emptied of life and available to be conquered or colonized. The maps in Terra Forma lead us inward, not off into the distance, moving from the horizon line of conventional cartography to the thickness of the ground, from the global to the local. Each map in Terra Forma is based on a specific territory or territories, and each tool, or model, creates a new focal point through which the territory is redrawn. The maps are “living maps,” always under construction, spaces where stories and situations unfold. They may map the Earth’s underside rather than its surface, suggest turning the layers of the Earth inside out, link the biological physiology of living inhabitants and the physiology of the land, or trace a journey oriented not by the Euclidean space of GPS but by points of life. These speculative visualizations can constitute the foundation for a new kind of atlas.




Behind the Walls of Terra


Book Description

Behind the walls of Terra lay a secret no man could be allowed to learn. But Kickaha - the Earth-born adventurer of the tiered worlds - had to uncover that secret, or watch his home world destroyed. Kickaha was returning to Earth from the World of Tiers, the many-levelled universe of the god-like Lords, that he had entered many years ago as Paul Janus Finnegan. Now he had returned to a world he no longer knew, to find it ruled by Red Orc, a Lord jealous of his personal domain and hostile to intruders. Yet Kickaha had to stay alive in order to defeat the deadly enemy that threatened Earth and the other worlds of tiers - the 'Beller', the malignant creature that was the mind-essence of a rebel Lord.




Terra's World


Book Description

TERRA, which Neil Gaiman said reminded him of Douglas Adams,Terry Pratchett and Roald Dahl, launched the novel writing career of stand-up comedian and BBC Radio 4 NOW SHOW regular Mitch Benn. Now Terra is a couple of years older and back on earth. She's in hiding. And in Terra's World we find out why. But none of this is known to Billy Dolphin. He's just annoyed that since Terra returned to Earth Science Fiction has died a death. How wrong could a teenage boy be? Terra may be back on Earth but the powers of the universe are not finished with her. Her old home faces a terrible threat which possibly only Terra can overcome. Just what is the black planet? To find out first Terra must learn how to survive as there is an alien bounty hunter on her trail. And only Billy Dolphin to help her. www.mitchbenn.com Facebook: mitch.benn.3 Twitter: @MitchBenn




Territory Beyond Terra


Book Description

At the root of our understanding of territory is the concept of terra—land—a surface of fixed points with stable features that can be calculated, categorised, and controlled. But what of the many spaces on Earth that defy this simplistic characterisation: Oceans in which ‘places’ are continuously re-formed? Air that can never be fully contained? Watercourses that obtain their value by transcending boundaries? This book examines the politics of these spaces to shed light on the challenges of our increasingly dynamic world. Through a focus on the planet’s elements, environments, and edges, the contributors to Territory beyond Terra extend our understanding of territory to the dynamic, contentious spaces of contemporary politics.




Mysteries of Terra Firma


Book Description

In Mysteries of Terra Firma, James Lawrence Powell tells an engrossing three-part tale of how we came to understand the ground on which we walk, and how that ground holds the key to the greatest secrets of deep space and time. Naming his profound stories Time, Drift, and Chance, he tells of the three twentieth-century revolutions in thought that created the amazing science of Earth -- and of all planets to the edge of the universe. The riddle that drove the first revolution is obvious and yet in 1904 remained impenetrable: how old is Earth? An encounter between the imperious Lord Kelvin and a New Zealand farm-boy-turned-physicist, Ernest Rutherford, set the stage for the solution and launched a golden century of geology. As a result, scientists learned that if the 4.5 billion years of geologic time were compressed into a single twenty-four-hour period, Homo sapiens would have arrived only in the last second. The geological Revolution of Time reveals how long the ground on which we walk has existed, and how briefly we have trod that ground. In the early twentieth century, German meteorologist and polar explorer Alfred Wegener proposed a counterintuitive, heretical theory: that terra firma is not so firm; instead of being fixed in place, continents drift. In 1926, petroleum geologists convened in New York City to discuss Wegener's radical idea, where it was met with outrage and skepticism: "If we are to believe Wegener's hypothesis we must forget everything which has been learned in the last seventy years and start all over again," one attendee said. Forty years later, a new generation did exactly that. The Revolution of Drift, the second part of Powell's narrative, showed us how the ground on which we walk moves. Throughout geologic time, meteorites have incessantly bombarded everything in the solar system. Far from serene and predictable, the planets are ruled by random violence on an unimaginable scale. Once a mountain-sized meteorite flew through space, struck the Earth, killed the dinosaurs and two-thirds of all species, and spared the small hamster-sized creature that happened to be our ancestor. The chance of that happening again is essentially zero. So, the final revolution in Powell's history of a golden century of geology is the Revolution of Chance. Simply put, this revolution in thought has transformed our understanding of how lucky we really are. If we can learn so much from considering no more than the rocks beneath our feet, what will we learn when we begin walking on other planets? Mysteries of Terra Firma is both charming in its storytelling and staggering in its implications. Discovering the ground on which we stand is a fascinating journey into our past -- and our future.




Terra


Book Description

In this brilliant synthesis of evolutionary biology, paleontology, and modern environmental science, Novacek shows how all three can help readers understand and prevent what he and others call todays mass extinction event.




Understanding Physics


Book Description

Understanding Physics – Second edition is a comprehensive, yet compact, introductory physics textbook aimed at physics undergraduates and also at engineers and other scientists taking a general physics course. Written with today's students in mind, this text covers the core material required by an introductory course in a clear and refreshing way. A second colour is used throughout to enhance learning and understanding. Each topic is introduced from first principles so that the text is suitable for students without a prior background in physics. At the same time the book is designed to enable students to proceed easily to subsequent courses in physics and may be used to support such courses. Mathematical methods (in particular, calculus and vector analysis) are introduced within the text as the need arises and are presented in the context of the physical problems which they are used to analyse. Particular aims of the book are to demonstrate to students that the easiest, most concise and least ambiguous way to express and describe phenomena in physics is by using the language of mathematics and that, at this level, the total amount of mathematics required is neither large nor particularly demanding. 'Modern physics' topics (relativity and quantum mechanics) are introduced at an earlier stage than is usually found in introductory textbooks and are integrated with the more 'classical' material from which they have evolved. This book encourages students to develop an intuition for relativistic and quantum concepts at as early a stage as is practicable. The text takes a reflective approach towards the scientific method at all stages and, in keeping with the title of the text, emphasis is placed on understanding of, and insight into, the material presented.




Global Population


Book Description

Concern about the size of the world’s population did not begin with the Baby Boomers. Overpopulation as a conceptual problem originated after World War I and was understood as an issue with far-reaching ecological, agricultural, economic, and geopolitical consequences. This study traces the idea of a world population problem as it developed from the 1920s through the 1950s, long before the late-1960s notion of a postwar “population bomb.” Drawing on international conference transcripts, the volume reconstructs the twentieth-century discourse on population as an international issue concerned with migration, colonial expansion, sovereignty, and globalization. It connects the genealogy of population discourse to the rise of economically and demographically defined global regions, the characterization of “civilizations” with different standards of living, global attitudes toward “development,” and first- and third-world designations.




Terras Tales


Book Description

TerrasBlog Tales is the story of one mans obsession with an English non-league football club. It diarises the rise and fall of the WFC through recent years.




Adventures on Terra - Book 1


Book Description

Armon Ellington is nineteen year old kid that always felt out of place. He's an orphan, a gamer, and a role playing game geek. When he dies after a seventy-two hour gaming marathon, instead of going to an afterlife he's transported to a new world governed by rules that are eerily similar to the RPG games he loves. On this new world, Terra, he can be anything he wants, a warrior, mage, or even a crafter. Only, Armon wants more than that, he also wants friends and family. Join Armon on his journey through this amazing new world where he'll go on adventures, explore dungeons, slay monsters and hopefully find the friends and family he never had on earth.