Books about Ingenuity from Amazon.com

Combining and updating the renowned Rigger's Apprentice and Rigger's Locker, Complete Rigger's Apprentice meets the changing face of modern materials and technology while remaining true to rigging's best traditional principles and practices. It's much more than a knot book, though the knots a sailor needs are all here. It's a book for sailors who want the satisfaction and hard-cash savings of stepping their own masts, inspecting and maintaining their own rigs, and turning their own tailsplices and wire eyesplices. It is for boatowners who want to replace an entire gang of rigging themselves--measuring, choosing appropriate wire, turning soft eyes, leathering, and serving. It is for bluewater voyagers who want to feel secure in the knowledge that, should a shroud carry away far at sea, they will be able to repair it.

The Complete Rigger's Apprentice is also a free-roaming collection of useful ideas and tips on everything from supplementing winches with block and tackle, to rigging snubbers at anchor, to using pantyhose for an emergency fanbelt. In short, it's the definitive book on the art of rigging, written by its most entertaining practitioner..
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From award-winning writer and biologist Bernd Heinrich, an intimate, accessible and eloquent illumination of animal survival in Winter.

From flying squirrels to grizzly bears, torpid turtles to insects with antifreeze, the animal kingdom relies on some staggering evolutionary innovations to survive winter. Unlike their human counterparts, who must alter their environment to accommodate our physical limitations, animals are adaptable to an amazing range of conditions--i.e., radical changes in a creature's physiology take place to match the demands of the environment. Winter provides an especially remarkable situation, because of how drastically it affects the most elemental component of all life: water.

Examining everything from food sources in the extremely barren winter landscape to the chemical composition that allows certain creatures to survive, Heinrich's Winter World awakens the largely undiscovered mysteries by which nature sustains herself through the harsh, cruel exigencies of winters

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GI Ingenuity is in large part an old-fashioned combat narrative, with mayhem and mass slaughter at center stage. But the book goes farther, combining military history with the history of science, technology, and culture to show how the American soldier improvised, innovated, and adapted on the battlefield. Among the improvisations and technologies covered are tanks equipped with hedgerow cutters, the coordination of air and ground attacks, and the use of radios and aircraft to direct artillery fire--all of which contributed to American success on D-Day and afterwards..
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The nineteen essays here illustrate many different aspects of mathematical thinking. The author is very well-known for his best-selling books of problems; in this volume he seeks to share his appreciation of the elegant and ingenious approaches used in thinking about even elementary mathematics. Standard high school courses in algebra and geometry furnish a sufficient basis for understanding each essay. Topics include number theory, geometry, combinatorics, logic and probability, and the methods used often involve an interaction between these disciplines. Some of the essays are easy to read, others more challenging; some of the exercises are routine, others lead the reader deeper into the subject..
Price: $23.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Talent has little to do with who becomes successful in the business of acting. What can impact your chances for success more than anything else is learning how to be a smart, empowered actor.

The Business of Acting: Learn the Skills You Need to Build the Career You Want will teach you the four critical, pro-active skills every actor needs to know and to implement them to begin or to jump-start your career journey.

In The Business of Acting, you will learn how to generate professional opportunities; how to survive and thrive through the transition from student to professional performing artist; how to choose the right representation; how to partner with casting directors; how to have a head shot that really works for you; how the unions work for and against actors; how to conquer emotional, physical and fiscal fitness; how the laws of perception and behavior can impact a career; how to use publicity, marketing and PR in support of your career; how to create a personal business plan; and how to set realistic, achievable goals.

With a foreword by Emmy Award-winning actress Isabel Sanford, star of the long-running series "The Jeffersons," The Business of Acting has been called a "must-read" by Back Stage West..
Price: $5.55 [Notify me when price goes down.]

When Eugene Linden was writing The Parrot's Lament--a book subtitled "And Other True Tales of Animal Intrigue, Intelligence, and Ingenuity"--he enjoyed joking around with his 2-year-old daughter Sofia. "Are you a rutabaga?" "I'm not a rutabaga!" she would giggle. "Are you a waterbug?" "I'm not a waterbug!" Soon, Sofia learned to riff off her father's teasing: "I'm not a rutabaga; Daddy is a rutabaga!" or the truly insightful, "I'm not a rutabaga; the baby is a rutabaga I'm a waterbug!"

As a passionate and accomplished student of animal intelligence since the '70s, Linden--of course--couldn't resist comparing Sofia's reasoning to that of an ape, puzzling over the cognitive cusp upon which she teetered. And it's this affectionate but knowledgeable analysis, the gentle transition from rutabagas to metacognition and emergent symbolic ability, that makes The Parrot's Lament so satisfying, sentimental but still scientifically solid. The science of consciousness and animal intelligence is contentious, but many in the field--Linden included--deeply suspect that animals know more than we can verify. Linden lays down the science with clarity and good humor, but he leaves it to his animal coauthors, the amorous dolphins, escape-artist orangs, enigmatic cats, and lying hyenas that populate the book's scores of anecdotes, to make his argument. --Paul Hughes.
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