It was one of the biggest scandals in New York University history. Professor John Buettner-Janusch, chair of the Anthropology Department, was convicted of manufacturing LSD and Quaaludes in his campus laboratory. He claimed the drugs were for an animal behavior experiment, but the jury found otherwise. B-J, as he was known, served two years in prison before being paroled, emerging to find his life and career in shambles. Four years later, he sought revenge by trying to kill the sentencing judge and others with poisoned Valentine’s Day chocolates. After pleading guilty to attempted murder, he was sentenced to twenty years in prison, where he died in mysterious circumstances. But before he was infamous at NYU, B-J, a scientific luminary, had also taught at Yale and Duke. One of the world’s foremost authorities on lemurs, our distant primate relatives on the remote island of Madagascar, he brought international attention to these endearing and endangered creatures. He cofounded the Duke Lemur Center in North Carolina and inspired a whole generation of scientists to study them and conservationists to save them and their habitat. His trials captured national headlines, but the mad scientist’s full story has never been told—until now.

After the Glorious Revolution, a not so glorious age of lawlessness befell England. Crime ran rampant, and highwaymen, thieves, and prostitutes ruled the land. Execution by hanging often punished the smallest infractions, and rip-roaring stories of fearless criminals proliferated, giving birth to a new medium: the newspaper. In 1724, housebreaker Jack Sheppard—a “pocket Hercules,” his small frame packed with muscle—finally met the hangman. Street singers sang ballads about the Cockney burglar because no prison could hold him. Each more astonishing than the last, his final jailbreak took him through six successive locked rooms, after which he shimmied down two blankets from the prison roof to the street below. Just before Sheppard swung, he gave an account of his life to a writer in the crowd. Daniel Defoe stood in the shadow of the day’s literati—Swift, Pope, Gay—and had done hard time himself for sedition and bankruptcy. He saw how prison corrupted the poor. They came out thieves, but he came out a journalist. Six months later, the author of Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders covered another death at the hanging tree. Jonathan Wild looked every bit the brute—body covered in scars from dagger, sword, and gun, bald head patched with silver plates from a fractured skull—and he had all but invented the double-cross. He cultivated young thieves, profited from their work, then turned them in for his reward—and their execution. But one man refused to play his game. Sheppard didn’t take orders from this self-proclaimed “thief-taker general,” nor would he hawk his loot through Wild’s fences. The two-faced bounty hunter took it personally and helped bring the young burglar’s life to an end. But when Wild’s charade came to light, he quickly became the most despised man in the land. When he was hanged for his own crimes, the mob wasn’t rooting for Wild as it had for Sheppard. Instead, they hurled stones, rotten food, and even dead animals at him. Defoe once again got the scoop, and tabloid journalism as we know it had begun.

Once upon a time, a young grey Rabbit explored a forgotten WW2 chemical dump. Being young and foolish he drank some sweet tasting liquid. Very soon he was experiencing growing pains and, by the age of one, was five feet eight inches high and talking English with a South London accent. He called himself, rather un-originally, Bunny Warren and become a bit of a Dick; a sleazy, alcoholic, wise cracking, Private Eye. This is a report of one of the investigations of Bunny Warren, the Strange Case of the Missing Ginger. When a lady goes missing from a premier rate call line, Bunny and his beautiful assistant Jane, go in search of her. Along the way, they get drawn into a web of bad guys, fiesty females and a very odd mad scientist.

The present study uncovers the psychical stakes and dramas involved in Redgrove's practice, and in turn relates these stakes and dramas to the marked element of cultural critique to be found in Redgrove's nonfiction, but which is virtually absent from the poems."--BOOK JACKET.

Within these tantalizing pages lie the keys to the mysteries of science. For here, in strange and delectable detail, are dozens of hitherto secret experiments for concocting slimes and putties, inventing miniature robots and transport devices, growing crystal gardens, and many other useful creations-all crafted from widely available household products. Where did these wondrous projects originate? Apparently in a shadowy toy research laboratory that once operated out of a tiny island in the South Pacific. The Zoober Laboratory has since vanished, but we recovered its crown jewel-a secret notebook: a source of astounding information, fabulously illustrated. Lets just be thankful the pages are wipe-clean.

The Mad Professor of Babeldu is a work of fiction with an eccentric professor as its major character. Sitting alone in his farmhouse, Professor Philjez, in a profound and sometimes comic manner, talks on a variety of issues from politics to religion, economics, culture, science, and a myriad of other issues. This book no doubt will resonate with many readers because of its unusual character and profound ideas. Bizarre, comical, shocking, profound, and perhaps blasphemous are all adjectives aptly descriptive of The Mad Professor of Babeldu. Driven by Professor Philjez, its eccentric major character, this book despairs and inspires, saddens and excites, frightens and soothes, sobers and intoxicates a reader. It is a mixed grille. It is a jolly, hearty party of ideas that cannot fail to go away with gold medals in any Olympic contest of ideas.

The Mad Professor is the story of one man's battle in the 1960-70's Pacific Northwest against institutionalized bureaucracy and the strangulating effects of academic politics. Leo Bauer is first encouraged and then destroyed by the academic machine. The novel is literary, not easy to pigeonhole. The Mad Professor is a divergent novel, a confession of sorts by a man subversive to the organizations governing his life while remaining committed in his dedication to the natural world of Wisconsin, Utah, and Washington whose natural history is contemplated and analyzed. Bureaucracy represented by a community college is explored through hallucinations, stream of consciousness and magical realism. While Leo Bauer searches for authenticity life hammers him and he suffers losses of his profession, wife, reputation and assets during the Vietnam era, the time of sex, drugs, rock and roll, oil crisis and recession. Despite the somber nature of his struggle the novel has a great deal of broad and satiric humor. Leo Bauer's fantasy world becomes wilder and wilder including his exploration of a huge DNA Helix, the prophecies of a lobotomized fellow teacher, and the Curriculum of Death in which students are bombed and attacked with strafing airplanes. This digressive narrative resists linearity. Leo Bauer commences life in Wisconsin where he experiences paradise among the lakes and forests. Throughout this man searches for authenticity in a culture of false values. Librarians and booksellers should classify it as community college satire.

Prof. Philjez is not the everyday professor. His mind passes the world through a mystic calculus and comes out with quaint theorems. His eyes views life through a cosmic geometry, and he formulates shocking hypothesis. Speaking more to animals and plants than to human beings, Prof. Philjez takes flight to the world of ideas from which he never returns. You need to be a little mad to read this book.

Finance Fictions takes the measure of what it means to live in a world ruled by high finance by examining the tension between psychosis and realism that plays out in the contemporary finance novel. When the things traded at the center of the economy cease to be things at all, but highly abstracted speculations, how do we come to see the real? What sorts of narrative can accurately approach the actual workings of a neoliberal economy marked by accelerating cycles of market crashes, economic and political crisis, and austerity? Revisiting such twentieth-century classics of the genre as Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, De Boever argues that the twenty-first century is witnessing the birth of a new kind of realistic novel that can make sense of complex financial instruments like collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and digital algorithms operating at speeds faster than what human beings or computers can record. If in 1989 Wolfe could still urge novelists to work harder to “tame the billion-footed beast of reality,” today’s economic reality confronts us with a difference that is qualitative rather than quantitative: a new financial ontology requiring new modes of thinking and writing. Mobilizing the philosophical thought of Quentin Meillassoux in the close reading of finance novels by Robert Harris, Michel Houellebecq, Ben Lerner and less well-known works of conceptual writing such as Mathew Timmons’ Credit, Finance Fictions argues that realism is in for a speculative update if it wants to take on the contemporary economy—an “if” whose implications turn out to be deeply political. Part literary study and part philosophical inquiry, Finance Fictions seeks to contribute to a new mindset for creative and critical work on finance in the twenty-first century.

How does coding change the way we think about architecture? This question opens up an important research perspective. In this book, Miro Roman and his AI Alice_ch3n81 develop a playful scenario in which they propose coding as the new literacy of information. They convey knowledge in the form of a project model that links the fields of architecture and information through two interwoven narrative strands in an “infinite flow” of real books. Focusing on the intersection of information technology and architectural formulation, the authors create an evolving intellectual reflection on digital architecture and computer science.