How War, Pornography, and Fast Food Have Shaped Modern Technology Guns, Germs, and Steel meets the age of technology in this rollicking history of how our pursuit of lust, gluttony, and rage has led to our greatest technological advancements. It is also a chronicle of popular culture, packed with surprising revelations. From the unexpected origins of aerosols, cold medicine, and Google to Saran Wrap, Tupperware, and video games, here is a fascinating look at modern life.

A coming of age story set in a Scottish fast food restaurant: take a group of full time burger flippers and cash starved students, add a likeable geek with a love of political theory, and a passionately angry French anarchist, and you have a recipe for rebellion. Rife with dry British humor and working-class sensibilities.

Meanwhile, back in the darkened alleys of a city near you... trouble is brewing. A fight breaks out. A mugger shakes down an innocent tourist. Inequality is on the rise. Enter our heroes. Dark Guardian chases off an angry drug dealer in Manhattan. Mr. Xtreme charges in and breaks up a San Diego bar brawl. T.O. Ronin hugs a homeless man on the snowy streets of Toronto. These aren’t the big-screen or comic-book heroes that have been increasingly dominating pop culture. They’re real-life superheroes: individuals who take on masked personae to fight crime and help the helpless. They don’t have superpowers, but they do try to make the world a better place. Lifelong comic-book fan and veteran journalist Peter Nowak goes to the source of this phenomenon, meeting with real-life superheroes in North America and around the world to get their stories and investigate what the movement means for the future of society. To some people, real-life superheroes may seem like quirky outliers or dangerous vigilantes but, as Nowak shows, they are also archetypes whose job is to remind us of the better part of human nature.

Scientific Communication in History attempts to illuminate the various ways that science has developed and interacted with communication tools and mechanisms throughout the history of human thought. Drawing on a wide range of human history, Vickery presents a compelling and coherent background and probes into questions of science as a discipline, communication between scientists, its relationship to technology and to other academic and professional disciplines, and knowledge in general. The history of communication in science is set against a briefly sketched background of human history, particularly as it relates to the development of Western civilization, including Greece, Rome, the Near East, and Europe. The book is divided into seven major eras. Within each era, Vickery details the modes of written and oral communication and their significant effects, and creates a broad picture of the antecedents of contemporary research and communication methods in science. The eras include the earliest organized civilizations and the development of alphabets and writing; classical cultures and the first libraries and research institutions; the medieval period and the rise of universities; the Renaissance and the early age of science societies and printing; the eighteenth century with specialized journals and bibliographies; the nineteenth century and the Industrial Revolution, along with the beginnings of the strict specification of information through patents and technical institutions; and the twentieth century with industrial research, vast data collections, computer networks, and online communication. Special attention is paid to key issues such as impact of printing and computers on communication, the standardization of biological and chemical nomenclature, and modern studies of communication science and technology, among many others. The book includes 14 illustrations, maps, graphs, and diagrams to further elucidate the historical change of communication in science, and a bibliography of 300 choice item

An exploration of the fast food industry in the United States, from its roots to its long-term consequences.

Once again, Ken Cope has produced a major new reference work that broadens our range of understanding of the history of technological innovation. This is the first book to identify American lathe builders operating throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. Written in the style of the author's previous groundbreaking books on the machine tool industry, this encyclopedic volume provides the collector, user, and researcher with invaluable information on over 330 lathe builders, many of whom have previously gone unrecognized by researchers. More than a thousand illustrations, taken from original catalogs and periodicals, trace the development of the American metal cutting lathe from the crude, handbuilt models of the early 19th century to the fast, powerful models introduced in the early 20th century for use with high speed steel cutting tools. Dozens of early lathe accessories, such as gear-cutting attachments, are also identified and illustrated for the first time. In addition, the book contains a glossary of terms used in describing the various lathes

Hilarity ensues when a slacker teen boy discovers he's gay, in this unforgettably funny YA debut.

Life for early humans wasn’t easy. They may have been able to walk on two feet and create tools 4 million years ago, but they couldn’t remember or communicate. Fortunately, people got smarter, and things got better. They remembered on-the-spot solutions and shared the valuable information of their experiences. Clubs became swords, caves became huts, and fires became ovens. Collectively these new tools became technology. As the 21st century unfolds, the pace of innovation is accelerating exponentially. Breakthroughs from robotics to genetics appear almost on a daily basis. It’s all happening so quickly that it’s hard to keep track—but recently there’s been a shift. We used to create technology to change the world around us; now we’re using it to change ourselves. With vaccinations, in-vitro fertilization, and individual genetic therapy, we’re entering a new epoch, a next step, faster and more dramatic than the shift from Australopithicines to Homo Sapiens. The technology that set us apart from our earliest selves is becoming part of the evolutionary process. Advancements in computing, robotics, nanotechnology, neurology, and genetics mean that our wildest imaginings could soon become commonplace. Peter Nowak deftly presents the potential outcomes—both exciting and frightening—of key, rapidly advancing technologies and adroitly explores both the ramifications of adopting them and what doing so will reveal about the future of our species. We’ve come a long way in 4 million years. Welcome to Human 3.0.

Named one of Vulture’s Top 10 Best Books of 2020! Leftist firebrand Fredrik deBoer exposes the lie at the heart of our educational system and demands top-to-bottom reform. Everyone agrees that education is the key to creating a more just and equal world, and that our schools are broken and failing. Proposed reforms variously target incompetent teachers, corrupt union practices, or outdated curricula, but no one acknowledges a scientifically-proven fact that we all understand intuitively: Academic potential varies between individuals, and cannot be dramatically improved. In The Cult of Smart, educator and outspoken leftist Fredrik deBoer exposes this omission as the central flaw of our entire society, which has created and perpetuated an unjust class structure based on intellectual ability. Since cognitive talent varies from person to person, our education system can never create equal opportunity for all. Instead, it teaches our children that hierarchy and competition are natural, and that human value should be based on intelligence. These ideas are counter to everything that the left believes, but until they acknowledge the existence of individual cognitive differences, progressives remain complicit in keeping the status quo in place. This passionate, voice-driven manifesto demands that we embrace a new goal for education: equality of outcomes. We must create a world that has a place for everyone, not just the academically talented. But we’ll never achieve this dream until the Cult of Smart is destroyed.

Pornography: The force for change that has been written out of the history of world culture. From cave painting to photography to the internet, pornography has always been at the cutting edge in adopting and exploiting new developments in mass communication. And in so doing, it has helped to promote and propel those developments in ways that are rarely acknowledged. Without pornography, the internet would not have grown so quickly. The e-commerce payment systems that are now commonplace would be at a far more primitive stage security and usability. Without video streaming software developed for pornography sites, CNN would be struggling to deliver news clips. Without advertising from sex sites, Google could not have afforded YouTube. This smart, witty and well-researched history shows how a vast secret trade has bankrolled and shaped mainstream culture and its machines.