"The abyssal plain. If you could walk directly into the sea, through the surf and away from the land, you would be likely to descend a gentle slope for two or three days. The water over your head would gradually become deeper, until the surface was about 200m above, say two average city blocks away. About this time the gradient would begin to increase, and soon you are walking quite steeply downhill, with the surface rapidly receding. The sediment beneath your feet will thicken as you approach the edge of the continent, where the soil and debris washed from the land eventually accumulates. At the end of a long day's walk the gradient eases and you stride out onto a prairie that stretches away into the far distance, flat and featureless, or sometimes with rolling hills or even studded with sudden abrupt mountains. The surface is now quite far away, not mere city blocks but the whole downtown core of a large city distant from where you stand. You have arrived at the edge of the abyssal plain. The details of your walk will vary according to where you start out, and might be quite different if you begin in eastern Canada and walk into the Atlantic, say, or in western Canada and walk into the North Pacific. In either case, though, you will eventually reach the abyssal plain, where the last of the land has been left behind and nothing is familiar"--

"The abyssal plain. If you could walk directly into the sea, through the surf and away from the land, you would be likely to descend a gentle slope for two or three days. The water over your head would gradually become deeper, until the surface was about 200m above, say two average city blocks away. About this time the gradient would begin to increase, and soon you are walking quite steeply downhill, with the surface rapidly receding. The sediment beneath your feet will thicken as you approach the edge of the continent, where the soil and debris washed from the land eventually accumulates. At the end of a long day's walk the gradient eases and you stride out onto a prairie that stretches away into the far distance, flat and featureless, or sometimes with rolling hills or even studded with sudden abrupt mountains. The surface is now quite far away, not mere city blocks but the whole downtown core of a large city distant from where you stand. You have arrived at the edge of the abyssal plain. The details of your walk will vary according to where you start out, and might be quite different if you begin in eastern Canada and walk into the Atlantic, say, or in western Canada and walk into the North Pacific. In either case, though, you will eventually reach the abyssal plain, where the last of the land has been left behind and nothing is familiar"--

In announcing that he had stopped serving the fattened livers of force-fed ducks and geese at his world-renowned restaurant, influential chef Charlie Trotter heaved a grenade into a simmering food fight, and the Foie Gras Wars erupted. He said his morally minded menu revision was meant merely to raise consciousness, but what was he thinking when he also suggested -- to Chicago Tribune reporter Mark Caro -- that a rival four-star chef 's liver be eaten as "a little treat"? The reaction to Caro's subsequent front-page story was explosive, as Trotter's sizable hometown moved to ban the ancient delicacy known as foie gras while an international array of activists, farmers, chefs and politicians clashed forcefully and sometimes violently over whether fattening birds for the sake of scrumptious livers amounts to ethical agriculture or torture. "Take a dish with a funny French name, add ducks, top it all off with celebrity chefs eating each other's livers, and that's entertainment," Caro writes. Yet as absurd as battling over bloated waterfowl organs might seem, the controversy struck a serious chord even among those who had never tasted the stuff. Reporting from the front lines of this passionate dining debate, Caro explores the questions we too often avoid: What is an acceptable amount of suffering for an animal that winds up on our plate? Is a duck that lives comfortably for twelve weeks before enduring a few weeks of periodic force-feedings worse off than a supermarket broiler chicken that never sees the light of day over its six to seven weeks on earth? Why is the animal-rights movement picking on such a rarefied dish when so many more chickens, pigs and cows are being processed on factory farms? Then again, how could the treatment of other animals possibly justify the practice of feeding a duck through a metal tube down its throat? In his relentless yet good-humored pursuit of clarity, Caro takes us to the streets where activists use bullhorns, spray paint, Superglue and/or lawsuits as their weapons; the government chambers where politicians weigh the ducks' interests against their own; the restaurants and outlaw dining clubs where haute cuisine preparations coexist with Foie-lipops; and the U.S. and French farms whose operators maintain that they are honoring tradition, not abusing animals. Can foie gras survive after 5,000 years? Are we on the verge of a more enlightened era of eating? Can both answers be yes? Our appetites hang in the balance.

In today’s world, the use of numbers grows by the day, and we depend on them for so much. This book contains a series of lists that contain information about numbers and their use in society. They will be most useful to those with a quizzical nature but should be of general interest to all. ‘Schrödinger’s cat’ was an infamous and cruel thought experiment dreamt up in the last century to expose one of the mistaken ideas current in science at that time. Since escaping from the box Felix has taken up writing and, in collaboration with retired water engineer Pyotr Stilovsky, he has compiled this factual compendium.

Rosalie Gascoigne (1917–1999) was a highly regarded Australian artist whose assemblages of found materials embraced landscape, still life, minimalism, arte povera and installations. She was 57 when she had her first exhibition. Behind this late coming-out lay a long and unusual preparation in looking at nature for its aesthetic qualities, collecting found objects, making flower arrangements and practising ikebana. Her art found an appreciative audience from the start. She was a people person, and it pleased her that through her exhibiting career of 25 years, her works were acquired by people of all ages, interests and backgrounds, as well as by the major public institutions on both sides of the Tasman Sea.

Mirror's Fathom is the story of Tycho Wilhelm Lund anarchist, pirate, and thief of a legendary mirror. Tycho is also a great-nephew of the Danish philosopher S ren Kierkegaard and is, when the novel begins, a mild-mannered antiques dealer who is asked to assess the value of some furniture at the home of Regine Schlegel, Kierkegaard's famously jilted former love. Upon his arrival, Tycho who has no interest in philosophy finds himself at a meeting of the Kierkegaard Circle, a group faithfully reading aloud Kierkegaard's works. There he meets, and falls for, Countess Juliana Sophie, herself a passionate follower of Kierkegaard's thinking and self-appointed mistress of the "School for Selves."

Explores the possibilities of how life began on Earth four billion years ago