Engelska

The Greatest Nobodies Of History [Bok / Häftad]

<p><i>The Chaos Machine</i> is an essential book for our times - <i>Ezra Klein</i><br/><i><br/>The Chaos Machine</i> is the story of how the world was driven mad by social media. The election of populists like Trump and Bolsonaro; strife and genocide in countries like Myanmar; the rampant spread of COVID-19 conspiracy theories as deadly as the pandemic itself; all of these are products of a breakdown in our social and political lives, a breakdown driven by the apps, companies and algorithms that compete constantly for our attention.<br/><br/>Max Fisher is a leading New York Times technology reporter whose work has covered the way that social media sites - driven increasingly by artificial intelligence rather than human ingenuity - push users towards more and more extreme positions, deepening the divisions in society in pursuit of greater engagement and profit. With extraordinary access to the most powerful players in Silicon Valley, and with testimonies from around the world of the havoc being wreaked by our online selves, <i>The Chaos Machine</i> shows us how we got to this uniquely perilous moment - and how we might get out of it.</p>

SOMETHING TO FIGHT FOR, SOMEONE TO LIVE FOR Gods should never meddle in the affairs of mortals, but Xie Lian is not one to follow the rules when lives are at risk. He spits in the face of heaven and its laws and descends in a fury to save his country from drought and civil war. Yet this golden child gets a harsh dose of reality when he discovers just how little one individual-even a god-can do to save a crumbling nation. As the people reject and betray him, one young soldier stands by Xie Lian-a boy with a face wrapped in bandages and a fierce loyalty in his heart. In this chaotic past, can an unshakable bond grow from the ashes of unimaginable destruction?

<p><b>A hilarious look at how the line between 'genius' and 'extremely lucky idiot' is finer than we'd like to admit.</b><br/><br/>The more you delve into the stories behind history's greatest names, the more you realise they have something in common: a mystifying lack of common sense. Take Marie Curie, famous for both discovering radioactivity and having absolutely zero lab safety protocols. Or Lord Byron, who literally took a <i>bear</i> with him to university. Or James Glaisher, a hot-air balloon pioneer who nearly ended up as the world's first human satellite...<br/><br/>From Nikola Tesla falling in love with a pigeon to non-swimmer Albert Einstein's near-fatal love of sailing holidays, <i>The Limits of Genius</i> is filled with examples of the so-called brightest and best of humanity doing, to put it bluntly, some really dumb shit. These are the stories that deserve to be told but never are: the hilarious, regrettable and downright baffling lesser-known achievements of the men and women who somehow managed to bungle their way into our history books.</p>

<p><b>'A tragicomic triumph. You won't read a sadder, truer, funnier novel this year' <i>Guardian</i></b><br/><br/><b><i>'</i>It's a thing of beauty, a novel that will fill your heart' <i>Observer</i><br/><br/>'Hugely entertaining, vivid, ambitious and expansive . . . Murray is a natural storyteller'<i> Irish Times</i><br/><br/>'An expansive and blackly funny tale' Tanya Sweeney, <i>Irish Independent</i></b><br/><br/><b>Irresistibly funny, wise and thought-provoking, <i>The Bee Sting </i>is </b><b>a tour de force about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is falling apart . . .</b><br/><br/>The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie's once-lucrative car business is going under - but rather than face the music, he's spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife Imelda is selling off her jewellery on eBay while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way to her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home.<br/><br/>Where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favour to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil - can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written - is there still time to find a happy ending?</p>

Explore the life-changing magic of trigonometry with Matt Parker, stand-up mathematician and no. 1 bestselling author of Humble Pi Why do mobile phones work when you're on a train? What happens when you pull a pop song apart into pure sine waves and play it back on a piano? And what did mathematicians have to do with the great pig stampede of 2012? The answer to each of these questions can be found in the triangle. Humans have been using triangles for thousands of years to build structures, measure the earth, make music, paint vanishing points, pot snooker balls and much, much more. But trigonometry is not a thing of the past - triangles underpin all of modern data technology. When someone Snapchats a photo, the light travels into the camera as electromagnetic sine waves, Fourier analysis compresses the image and then trigonometry is used to send the data to someone else's phone; when you listen to a track on Spotify, triangles remove the sounds which a human ear can't perceive and re-assemble the song so that it's small enough to stream. Triangles are the hidden pattern beneath the surface of the contemporary world. Join Matt Parker, stand-up comedian and author of the first ever maths book to be a number one bestseller, as he uncovers the secrets of trigonometry and shares extraordinary stories about the mathematicians, philosophers and engineers who dared to take triangles seriously.