Mechanical Animals presents a biomimicry menagerie of animalistic machines that blur the lines between what is and isn't nature's design. Featuring 15 original stories by today's top science fiction and fantasy authors and contextual mecha-fauna essays by Insect Lab Studio maker, Mike Libby, and SF encyclopedist and author Jess Nevins.

“Maggie Estep is the bastard daughter of Raymond Chandler and Anaïs Nin. Her prose is hard-boiled and sexy; she turns a good phrase and shows some leg. Love Dance of the Mechanical Animals is one hell of a great book! By the way, when Chandler and Nin left her at the orphanage, she was adopted by Charles Bukowski and Dick Francis.” —Jonathan Ames, author of What’s Not to Love? Charting Life at Its Most Bizarre . . . is an obsession for Maggie Estep, and in Love Dance of the Mechanical Animals this obsession reaches a fever pitch that is as readable and as entertaining as it is strange. Here is your chance to experience the world according to one of our most original and honest voices. Love Dance of the Mechanical Animals showcases some of the best of what Maggie Estep has to offer. Here, gathered together for the first time, are Maggie’s infamous spoken word pieces—including “Sex Goddess of the Western Hemisphere,” “Hey Baby,” and “I’m an Emotional Idiot,”—that landed her on MTV and HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. This varied collection also brings together a myriad of writing styles, such as diary-style magazine columns, articles highlighting Estep’s friends and heroes—from punk godfather Iggy Pop to Permanent Midnight author Jerry Stahl—and short stories that feature Maggie’s own brand of original fiction. From her many smoking relapses, to her obsession with horses and horse racing, to her manic love life, to her motley assortment of friends, to her battles with an onslaught of killer attack “biker” fleas, to an epistolary short story that is a collaboration with Rick Moody, Maggie Estep offers a humorous if twisted view of reality in Love Dance of the Mechanical Animals.

From the concert stage to the dressing room, from the recording studio to the digital realm, SPIN surveys the modern musical landscape and the culture around it with authoritative reporting, provocative interviews, and a discerning critical ear. With dynamic photography, bold graphic design, and informed irreverence, the pages of SPIN pulsate with the energy of today's most innovative sounds. Whether covering what's new or what's next, SPIN is your monthly VIP pass to all that rocks.

With the resurgence of vinyl going from strength to strength, album cover art is as important as it's ever been. This sumptuous book brings together 250 of the greatest album covers of all time and is arranged chronologically, beginning in 1956. Our judging panel, drawn from the great and the good of the music industry, has selected the final 275 entries, giving their reasons for selection to accompany the illustrations. From rock ‘n’ roll to pop, R&B to jazz, blues and even folk, some of the album covers included are obvious classics, while others will surprise readers and jog memories. The chosen entries might not necessarily be of a best-selling release, but they are important artistically, stylistically or culturally. This fascinating book forms a wonderful visual record of this popular art form, and is an essential read for music fans the world over.

Mechanical Design of Structural Materials in Animals explores the principles underlying how molecules interact to produce the functional attributes of biological materials: their strength and stiffness, ability to absorb and store energy, and ability to resist the fatigue that accrues through a lifetime of physical insults. These attributes play a central role in determining the size and shape of animals, the ways in which they can move, and how they interact with their environment. By showing how structural materials have been designed by evolution, John Gosline sheds important light on how animals work. Gosline elucidates the pertinent theories for how molecules are arranged into macromolecular structures and how those structures are then built up into whole organisms. In particular, Gosline develops the theory of discontinuous, fiber-reinforced composites, which he employs in a grand synthesis to explain the properties of everything from the body wall of sea anemones to spiders' silks and insect cuticles, tendons, ligaments, and bones. Although the theories are examined in depth, Gosline's elegant discussion makes them accessible to anyone with an interest in the mechanics of life. Focusing on the materials from which animals are constructed, this book answers fundamental questions about mechanical properties in nature.

This book discusses how and why animals evolved into particular shapes. The book identifies the physical laws which decide over the evolutionary (selective) value of body shape and morphological characters. Comparing the mechanical necessities with morphological details, the author attempts to understand how evolution works, and which sorts of limitations are set by selection. The book explains morphological traits in more biomechanical detail without getting lost in physics, or in methods. Most emphasis is placed on the proximate question, namely the identification of the mechanical stresses which must be sustained by the respective body parts, when they move the body or its parts against resistance. In the first part of the book the focus is on ‘primitive’ animals and later on the emphasis shifts to highly specialized mammals. Readers will learn more about living and fossil animals. A section of the book is dedicated to human evolution but not to produce another evolutionary tree, nor to refine a former one, but to contribute to answering the question: “WHY early humans have developed their particular body shape".

Popular Mechanics inspires, instructs and influences readers to help them master the modern world. Whether it’s practical DIY home-improvement tips, gadgets and digital technology, information on the newest cars or the latest breakthroughs in science -- PM is the ultimate guide to our high-tech lifestyle.

This book begins with the assumption that the presence of non-human creatures causes an always-already uncanny rift in human assumptions about reality. Exploring the dark side of animal nature and the ‘otherness’ of animals as viewed by humans, and employing cutting-edge theory on non-human animals, eco-criticism, literary and cultural theory, this book takes the Gothic genre into new territory. After the dissemination of Darwin’s theories of evolution, nineteenth-century fiction quickly picked up on the idea of the ‘animal within’. Here, the fear explored was of an unruly, defiant, degenerate and entirely amoral animality lying (mostly) dormant within all of us. However, non-humans and humans have other sorts of encounters, too, and even before Darwin, humans have often had an uneasy relationship with animals, which, as Donna Haraway puts it, have a way of ‘looking back’ at us. In this book, the focus is not on the ‘animal within’ but rather on the animal ‘with-out’: other and entirely incomprehensible.

A survey of engineering creative techniques and a novel creative design methodology for the systematic generation of all possible design configurations of mechanical devices. It provides a solid background to assist instructors teaching creative design in mechanical engineering. It equally helps students to hone their creative talents in an effective manner, and it supplies a powerful tool for design engineers to come up with fresh concepts to meet new design requirements and constraints, and/or to avoid patent protection of existing products. The text is organised in such a way that it can be used for teaching or for self-study. It is designed for undergraduate courses in engineering design and/or senior design projects, but may also be adopted for graduate courses in advanced machine design, advanced kinematics, and/or special topics for teaching creative design in mechanical engineering.

Popular Mechanics inspires, instructs and influences readers to help them master the modern world. Whether it’s practical DIY home-improvement tips, gadgets and digital technology, information on the newest cars or the latest breakthroughs in science -- PM is the ultimate guide to our high-tech lifestyle.