The shadow of war stretches over the northlands. The elven wood burns as Zarrum invaders encroach from the north. Ogres, orcs, and goblin hoards wreak havoc and take strongholds, leaving slaughtered people and burned out villages in their wake. Jayde, a young elvish battlemage, burns as well . . . with vengeance. Her village destroyed, her mother murdered, she takes up her sword and bow, cloaking herself in spellcraft, to becoming the Butterfly Assassin, a thorn in the side of the Zarrum invaders. Still, hiding and killing is lonely work until she meets a human paladin from the south. A man of faith that calls her deeds to task. Mathus, Paladin of Thon the Thunderer, doesn’t know quite what to make of the elf girl he’s fallen in with. Swift with her blade and spells, Fiona doesn’t fit into any of the carefully crafted boxes he’s created for women or elves. Could she be the object of his god-given quest? The Butterfly Illusion is the second book in the Heroes of Harth series, an epic adventure across a sprawling fantasy world.

With this book you can enter a realm of dazzlingly deceptive designs that offer wonderful opportunities for imaginative and inventive coloring. You'll find a host of ingeniously contrived constructions, strange, interlocking shapes and mind-boggling arrangements that defy reality and challenge the imagination to grasp their form and structure. Optical illusions are always fun to look at; coloring these masterly mind-bending illusions will add an extra dimension of enjoyment and foster a new appreciation of mysterious pictorial puzzles that make us wonder if seeing is truly believing.

Embracing Illusion is an interdisciplinary study of a classic Korean novel. It argues that a work of narrative fiction can be taken seriously as Buddhist philosophical discourse. The capacity of fiction to speak on behalf of Buddhist truths is set in the larger context of how the literary imagination approaches the exploration of reality.

A stereogram is a two-dimensional image that, when viewed properly, creates a stunning, almost magical impression of depth. Objects seem to float or to pop out of patterns. And these complex and sophisticated designs, produced by two of the most famous stereogram creators in the world, are state of the art.

The closest he will ever come to happiness is when he's hurting her. Will she let him? A beautiful and twisted story of first love and innocence lost -- written when the author was just eighteen. Sphinxie and Cadence. Promised to each other in childhood. Drawn together again as teens. Sphinxie is sweet, compassionate, and plain. Cadence is brilliant, charismatic. Damaged. And diseased. When they were kids, he scarred her with a knife. Now, as his illness progresses, he becomes increasingly demanding. She wants to be loyal -- but fears for her life. Only the ultimate sacrifice will give this love an ending.

In the last fifty years our butterfly populations have declined by more than eighty per cent and butterflies are now facing the very real prospect of extinction. It is hard to remember the time when fields and meadows were full of these beautiful, delicate creatures – today we rarely catch a glimpse of the Wild Cherry Sphinx moths, Duke of Burgundy or the even once common Small Tortoiseshell butterflies. The High Brown Fritillary butterfly and the Stout Dart Moth have virtually disappeared. The eminent entomologist and award-winning author Josef H. Reichholf began studying butterflies in the late 1950s. He brings a lifetime of scientific experience and expertise to bear on one of the great environmental catastrophes of our time. He takes us on a journey into the wonderful world of butterflies - from the small nymphs that emerge from lakes in air bubbles to the trusting purple emperors drunk on toad poison - and immerses us in a world that we are in danger of losing forever. Step by step he explains the science behind this impending ecological disaster, and shows how it is linked to pesticides, over-fertilization and the intensive farming practices of the agribusiness. His book is a passionate plea for biodiversity and the protection of butterflies.

Visual illusions are compelling phenomena that draw attention to the brain's capacity to construct our perceptual world. The Compendium is a collection of over 100 chapters on visual illusions, written by the illusion creators or by vision scientists who have investigated mechanisms underlying the phenomena. --

The Art of Spiral Drawing offers a fresh, modern take on everyone’s favorite childhood toy from the 1960s through today, the Spirograph®. With The Art of Spiral Drawing, no complicated tools are needed, as artists of all skill levels learn to create their own spiral art using little more than paper and a pen or pencil. Written and illustrated by Jonathan Stephen Harris, the author of the popular The Art of Drawing Optical Illusions, the book opens with helpful sections on tools and materials, perspective, and shading, ensuring that beginning artists know the basics before getting started on the step-by-step projects that follow. Instructions for creating basic shapes, including a triangle, a circle, and a square, progress into more detailed patterns featuring perspective, florals, and more. Instructions are also included for creating a variety of subjects, from flowers to animals, all featuring a spiral pattern as their framework. Artists can even add color to their spiral artwork using the tips featured in the book and simple tools like colored pencils and markers. Beginning and intermediate artists, doodlers, optical illusionists, and more will love creating their own spiral and geometric art with the help of The Art of Spiral Drawing!

Quite soon, the world’s information infrastructure is going to reach a level of scale and complexity that will force scientists and engineers to approach it in an entirely new way. The familiar notions of command and control are being thwarted by realities of a faster, denser world of communication where choice, variety, and indeterminism rule. The myth of the machine that does exactly what we tell it has come to an end. What makes us think we can rely on all this technology? What keeps it together today, and how might it work tomorrow? Will we know how to build the next generation—or will we be lulled into a stupor of dependence brought about by its conveniences? In this book, Mark Burgess focuses on the impact of computers and information on our modern infrastructure by taking you from the roots of science to the principles behind system operation and design. To shape the future of technology, we need to understand how it works—or else what we don’t understand will end up shaping us. This book explores this subject in three parts: Part I, Stability: describes the fundamentals of predictability, and why we have to give up the idea of control in its classical meaning Part II, Certainty: describes the science of what we can know, when we don’t control everything, and how we make the best of life with only imperfect information Part III, Promises: explains how the concepts of stability and certainty may be combined to approach information infrastructure as a new kind of virtual material, restoring a continuity to human-computer systems so that society can rely on them.