How can a decade of brilliant engineering and 370 million dollars of scientific equipment be completely vaporized in exactly 37 seconds due to a single line of faulty computer code? The explosive maiden voyage of the European Space Agency's Ariane 5 rocket in 1996 remains the most infamous and costly software bug in the history of aerospace engineering. The rocket's catastrophic failure was entirely self-inflicted. Engineers had lazily reused the inertial reference software from the older,...

It took the Romans almost exactly 200 years to conquer the Iberian Peninsula (modern Spain and Portugal). The skillful and tenacious resistance of the various inhabitants, utilizing superior mobility in the rugged terrain to wage a guerrilla war, made the region the graveyard of many a Roman army. But the lessons, though painful, were eventually learnt and the heat of this socalled fiery war forged the legions into a more effective force. Daniel Varga analyzes the strategies and tactics of...

This book examines AI’s transformative impact on creativity, blending insights from economics, media studies, and technology to analyze its role in the arts and the broader creative industries. AI challenges the way we relate and use technology, as well as expand how we think of technological progress overall. Structured in three parts, the book first rethinks creativity as an inclusive, collaborative process through theories like Actor-Network-Theory, arguing AI is a new form of agency wi...

Includes Guadalupe Rivera Marín´s voice.Mesmerized for days outside Posada´s shop, watching as the master gave form to his figures, the boy Diego Rivera was invited in by the artist himself, to see how he worked. Since that moment, Rivera recognized Posada as one of his greatest teachers.In this book, an homage to the mexican engraver, we present a text in which Rivera the muralist speaks passionately about influence that Posada the lithographer and caricaturist had on his work: “Surely no...

This new edited collection brings together historians and social scientists to engage with the global history of Universal Basic Income (UBI) and offer historically-rich perspectives on contemporary debates about the future of work. In particular, the book goes beyond a genealogy of a seemingly utopian idea to explore how the meaning and reception of basic income proposals has changed over time. The study of UBI provides a prism through which we can understand how different intellectual tr...

Al abrir este libro prepárate para adentrarte en un abismo que te confrontará con tu propia insignificancia. Los ecos del infinito resuenan en estas páginas, invitándote a explorar los límites de la cordura, a mirar cara a cara a lo inefable y aceptar que, quizás, hay secretos que es mejor no desvelar. Este es el espíritu de “Grimorio cósmico: Ecos del infinito”: un viaje por lo desconocido que, aunque aterrador, resulta imposible de resistir.El terror cósmico, popularizado por H.P...

Borderlands: they stretch across national boundaries, and they create a unique space that extends beyond the international boundary. They extend north and south of what we think of as the actual “border,” encompassing even the urban areas of San Antonio, Texas, and Monterrey, Nueva León, Mexico, affirming shared identities and a sense of belonging far away from the geographical boundary.In Bridging Cultures: Reflections on the Heritage Identity of the Texas-Mexico Borderlands

It may be the most interesting and yet loneliest spot on earth: a volcanic rock surrounded by a million square miles of ocean, named for the day Dutch explorers discovered it, Easter Sunday, April 5, 1722. Here people created a complex society, sophisticated astronomy, exquisite wood sculpture, monumental stone architecture, roads, and a puzzling ideographic script. And then they went about sculpting amazing, giant human figures in stone.This richly illustrated book of the history,...

While Gaiseric has not become a household name like other 'barbarian' leaders such as Attila or Genghis Khan, his sack of Rome in AD455 has made his tribe, the Vandals, synonymous with mindless destruction. Gaiseric, however, was no moronic thug, proving himself a highly skilful political and military leader and was one of the dominant forces in Western Mediterranean region for almost half a century.The book starts with a concise history of the Vandals before Gaiseric's reign and analyses ...

"Shows Marius the man, warts and all . . . an excellent biography . . . a very good breakdown of Roman politics, and a civics course in ancient Rome."— A Wargamers Needful ThingsGaius Marius was one of the most remarkable and significant figures of the late Roman Republic. At a time when power tended to be restricted to a clique of influential families, he rose from relatively humble origins to attain the top office of consul. He even went on to hold the post an un...

This military history of Ancient Rome analyses the empire's revitalized push against rising enemies to the East.In the century since Rome's defeat of the Seleucid Empire in the 180s BC, the East was dominated by the rise of new empires: Parthia, Armenia, and Pontus, each vying to recreate the glories of the Persian Empire. By the 80s BC, the Pontic Empire of Mithridates had grown so bold that it invaded and annexed the whole of Rome's eastern empire and occupied Gre...

This engaging historical narrative of the fall of the Western Roman Empire focuses on the individuals in power during its final forty years.The fall of the Western Roman Empire was a chaotic but crucial period of European history. To bring order to our understanding of this time, Patricians and Emperors offers a concise chronology with comparative biographies of the individuals who wielded significant power. It covers the period between the assassination o...