The distinctive look of the Luger and its role in German military history make it the world’s most famous handgun. In Luger, renowned gun expert John Walter traces the history of this semiautomatic pistol from an early design by Hugo Borchardt in the 1890s through its use in the trenches of the First World War to the final days of the Third Reich in WWII. Other books on the Parabellum-Pistole, as the Luger was also known, focus strictly on narrow subjects like manufacturing details or accessories. While still offering the technical details to satisfy the collector, Walter provides a comprehensive narrative history. Readers will learn of the initial collaboration between Borchardt and Georg J. Luger, who patented the design in 1898. Following initial adoption by the Swiss Army, design refinements convinced the Imperial German Navy to order the sidearm, while the US Army passed on it following field trials in favor of the Colt. Production ramped up for World War I and the gun became a prized trophy for Allied soldiers in both that conflict and World War II. (German soldiers, aware of their desirability, even used them as bait for booby traps.) Today, it is still desired by collectors both for its unique design and for its connection to the history of Nazi Germany, and Luger: The Story of the World’s Most Famous Handgun tells how it came to be.

One of the most difficult aspects of buying and selling Lugers is their almost legendary number of variations. Here is a decision tree approach to classifying all of them. Pick up this book and in seconds you can name the very Luger model in your hands. Each model and variation listed includes pricing information, proof marks, and detailed attributes on one single page in a handy, user-friendly format. Plus, it's fully indexed. Travel the gun show or auction circuit with this book in hand and consider yourself an instant collecting professional!

An invaluable resource for any wrestling fan of the era. The third in the series from www.historyofwrestling.info. This is the complete guide to every WWF VHS release from July 1993 to June 1996, with full reviews of every tape, alternative wrestler bios, exclusive artwork by Bob Dahlstrom, awards, match ratings, and much, much more. Learn about the ascension of Steve Austin, the death and rebirth of The Undertaker, the return of the Ultimate Warrior, the rise of the Kliq, some of the greatest matches of the 90s, some of the worst angles and gimmicks in wrestling history, the collapse of the tag team division, some of the inaugural WWF "divas", the wrestler who was half man and half bull, a tag team from the future, the aborted push of the next American hero and one of the worst WWF pay-per-view events of all time. This is the best volume yet and once again is stuffed to the gills with facts, opinions and cockamamie theories. Enjoy!

Knowing our World: An Artificial Intelligence Perspective considers the methodologies of science, computation, and artificial intelligence to explore how we humans come to understand and operate in our world. While humankind’s history of articulating ideas and building machines that can replicate the activity of the human brain is impressive, Professor Luger focuses on understanding the skills that enable these goals. Based on insights afforded by the challenges of AI design and program building, Knowing our World proposes a foundation for the science of epistemology. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective, the book demonstrates that AI technology offers many representational structures and reasoning strategies that support clarification of these epistemic foundations. This monograph is organized in three Parts; the first three chapters introduce the reader to the foundations of computing and the philosophical background that supports the AI tradition. These three chapters describe the origins of AI, programming as iterative refinement, and the representations and very high-level language tools that support AI application building. The book’s second Part introduces three of the four paradigms that represent research and development in AI over the past seventy years: the symbol-based, connectionist, and complex adaptive systems. Luger presents several introductory programs in each area and demonstrates their use. The final three chapters present the primary theme of the book: bringing together the rationalist, empiricist, and pragmatist philosophical traditions in the context of a Bayesian world view. Luger describes Bayes' theorem with a simple proof to demonstrate epistemic insights. He describes research in model building and refinement and several philosophical issues that constrain the future growth of AI. The book concludes with his proposal of the epistemic stance of an active, pragmatic, model-revising realism.

The full story of Germany's most successful handgun from its creation to the present day.