Machines Books

This book was perfect for my adventure loving 6 year-old son. I am looking for more titles by this author. The puzzles really make you think!

Jack's Time Machine is a delightful book suitable for young and old alike! It follows a magical and beautifully illustrated journey of a young boy and his trusted friend Scruff to the land of the Aztecs. The book contains five challenging conundrums, which have been skilfully integrated into the story as to make the reader feel that they are assisting Jack and Scruff in their quest. However the author has been kind enough to supply all of the solutions at the back of the book, just in case!

Dan James has once again proved that he is a man of many talents, a puzzle setter, author, and above all, a fine artist. The full-page illustrations are truly captivating and make it quite impossible for me to pick a favourite. To that end, it will ensure that Jack's Time Machine will remain a firm bedtime favourite for many a year to come.

There is however one puzzle who's solution still eludes me .... "Why has this book only been published in the States and Canada, when Mr James is British?" Thank you Amazon for bring this book to my attention!

The 20th century summed up as a series of important inventions and developments. It's an interesting and entertaining read, and May writes with wit and charm (full disclosure, I have a bit of a crush going here, so I could be slightly biased! And who knows, maybe the coauthor wrote the best bits). It's not meant to be the definitive work on the century, I imagine, but it's a great look at where lots of our important things came from, and where they went. You'll come away knowing a little more about any number of things, from motorcycles to guitars (and the scourge of the ukelele). One or two of the chapters drag a bit with the recital of purely technical information, but overall, it's pretty engaging.

Fans of James May's work on Top Gear will not be disappointed with this collection of essays on many of the major technological advances of the twentieth century.

There are some obscure (and entertaining) details within, but serious tech geeks won't encounter much they didn't already know. As a serious tech geek myself, that didn't keep me from enjoying it.

This is an excellent book for machine knitters. It doesn't matter what type of machine you own, this book is a great source for ideas. The book has very clear instructions and wonderful color photos of the techniques. If you have a chance to own this book than grab it! You won't be sorry!

What a pitty that this book is out of print! I found it at the library. This compendium of stitches is a feast for the eyes. The author presents each one of his samples in glorious colors, with detailed explanation on how to achieve them. The variety of techniques used and the multiple possibilities of experimentation, make of this a wonderful step by step teaching book for the beginner machine knitter, and a source of inspiration for the adventurous expert who wants to go beyond the limits to make of this craft an art.

I bought this book, thinking I would make one or two of the designs. I was wrong. I've made most of the designs and embellished on many more. This is a starting place for creative clothing that never stops. It is a must read for people who love creative clothing.

If you like making clothing for kids, this book is a must-read! I was not crazy about the color combinations used in the book but the ideas and techniques are original and inspiring. Very cute ideas that can easily be expanded upon.

As one of the nearly 100 technical reviewers for this book, I found this is a "must read" that will likely become THE classic reference for self-replicating machine systems. If you are familiar with Freitas' previous work (especially Nanomedicine, volumes I and II, but also the NASA Ames summer study http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/), then you'll know what to expect, and you won't be disappointed. And with the addition of Ralph Merkle's genius, I'm not surprised that the book is as good as it is.

Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines is an impressively thorough compendium of everything that's known, or has ever been done, in this field, including all theoretical and experimental efforts. The treatment is literally encyclopedic, with over 3000 literature references, hundreds of illustrations, and descriptions of several working systems which have already been built and operated in laboratory settings. KSRM is a surprising readable book that's an important resource for anyone interested in machine self-replication. If you want to learn about the history (all the way from Descartes) to this year's state of the art, especially self-replication of hardware as opposed to software, then this book is the one to get. Yes, it's a bit expensive, but it is truly a magnificent resource.

The book contains an exhaustive history of self-replicating machines, including von Neumann's studies and information-based replicators like computer viruses, proposals for self-replicating factories and actual achievements of self-replicating devices, and a complete discussion of proposals for microscale replicators which includes a description (for context) of the many ways biology replicates.

The authors also provide a new general taxonomy of replicators with a 137-dimensional classification system that subsumes all known actual and proposed self-replicating machine systems (though I'm sure that future systems and proposals will include more). No taxonomy ever proposed has come anywhere close to this level of comprehensiveness and specificity. There's also a technical discussion of many theoretical issues involving replicators, including replication time, minimum replicator size, replicator complexity, the exponential mathematics of replication and replicative manufacturing systems, and lots more.

There is a lot of misinformation out there about self-replication (from science fiction claiming to be based on fact, to ramblings by royalty - thank goodness for the Revolution), so it is really nice to see someone cover all the technical details in one place. The authors distinguish self-replication from self-reproduction, and in their discussion of "Replicators and Public Safety" and elsewhere it is clearly explained how to build safe self-replicating machines that cannot continue functioning in the face of variations, and how to mitigate or eliminate entirely the dangers inherent in possible runaway behaviors of successful machine self-replication processes that might be theorized. Reading this book makes you realize that a vast amount of work has already been done, but a great deal more remains to be done. KSRM is a significant landmark along the road to our technological future and urges us to pursue many possible pathways to practical success, including most prominently several approaches to molecular manufacturing involving nanotechnology and molecular assemblers (www.MolecularAssembler.com).

In our lab this is universally known as "The Bunny Book", for reasons that you can deduce by looking at the cover. You may also deduce that we refer to it sufficiently frequently to have given it a nickname. The reason it is simple - it is an outstandingly comprehensive work of reference for all the ideas and history in the burgeoning field of artificial replication.

Biology is the study of things that copy themselves. It used to be that the only examples we had of such things were those that had come about naturally by Darwin's Law of Evolution. But for the first time we are entering an age of intelligent design, with the only intelligence available to do the designing being our own. People are starting to build biological machines to go along with the natural living machines (including ourselves) that have evolved; at the small scale they are mostly doing this using the construction kit supplied by biochemistry; at the large scale they are simply using the ordinary mechanical and electronic components of conventional engineering.

This is one of the main the books upon which the biological revolution that will result will be founded. None of the consequent creations (nor our children) can escape Darwin's Law, of course - that is as fundamental as the Second Law of Thermodynamics upon which it depends. But we are adding an extra source of change to the random mutations that have driven evolution for three and a half billion years: thought-out innovation deduced from accurate scientific models of how matter, energy, and information behave.

Buy this book to get in at the start of the revolution that will give us the most exciting, terrible, and wonderful machines that have ever been made.

A great asset to anyone who owns the greatest machine available. The book covers the 1471 but is helpful to most of the machines around this age.

Those of us using an 'old' machine have to look very hard to find trade books for those older sewing machines. This book is really a gem. There's a lot of info packed into it. Used in conjunction with the Pfaff owner's manual, there isn't anything that can't be done on my little Pfaff. I stumbled across this title doing a search at my local library. It was so useful as a reference, that I bought my own copy.

Can you solve why dinosaurs died out? Can you prove how extinction came about? All you need to do is find the last dinosaur and bring back a tooth to prove you found the answer.
The Time Machine series is kind of like Choose You Own Adventure books, but lacks the younger versions' logic loops (that you can sometimes get trapped into) and death scenes. You can't die in a Time Machine book and your choices have effects that seem to be logical. You also end up learning alot even as you flee giant flesh-eating dinosaurs.

Time Machine books are just like the Choose your own adventure books. You read the page and at the end you will find two or three options from which you choose what to do next. Depending on your choice you will go to the page indicated to follow the story. Because of this you may read the book more than once and yet have a different story every time.

The Time Machine series had a high educational value. They usually included many history facts of which a child could learn from. Plus it was very, very fun to read.

Every book contained a data bank on which you could refer to you wanted a hint on the choices you were to make. And the time travel rules where pretty cool; you can not steal, kill any person or animals, jump in time in a scary way, or try to change history.

The specific book had many details on dinosaurs. Your mission is to find and photograph the archaeopteryx, creature believed to be the first bird.

It is so sad these books are not published anymore. I learned alot from them. Get them while you can.

This is a must read for anyone beginning to investigate the analysis of meaning in text using computational methods. I found the initial sections were useful in bringing together my thought on many different aspects of the topic.

This is a Tesis Work, it contains a review and conmparation of several learners. It focuses mainly on SVM.

For years I have looked for a credible book that traced the lineage of human and organizational performance improvement. All others had biases and lapses. This book written by one of the Masters who helped define and develop this field has written the best account of our lineage I have ever seen. It is beautifully written--clear, concise, accurate, and human--and meets (no, exceeds) my expectations.

It is a must for any student (senior or starting) in our field.

Although I selected Dr. Mager from all of the experts in the early 1960's to work with a major management consulting firm to introduce programmed instruction into European countries, and have stayed in touch since then, I learned more about him and his genius as I turned each page of this book. It is essential reading for everyone in the fields of education, training and management.

If there were an award for most provocative theory on the uses of computers, Ted Nelson would win it hands down. This book is a guide to the creative application of computing power, led by the relentlessly enthusiastic inventor of HyperText and HyperMedia. Nelson is a Populist, a bringer of freedom to the Artist, Writer, Musician, Photographer, Filmmaker or Poet who envisions the Screen as a portal to some new possibility of expression. If you are feeling limited by the boundaries of traditional computing and want to strike a blow for Computer Liberation, get this book!

This is a flattened example of hypertext in three levels by the inventor of the word... it is provocative and evocative... it violates all the rules by being unusually personal yet candid... while examining a subject which is both philosophical as well as pragmatic... it is *the* seminal work on hypertext