Bøger af Stephen Mann

My book has twenty-four chapters filled with real-life situations and the humorous outcomes that occur. For example, Melinda wonders WHY car engines are rated in horse-power and not cylinder-power. Or, WHY for instance, can't Melinda wear her "Calvin Kline designer shoes" while going for a hike in the woods. These and other questions like this will be answered inside my book. Stephen Mann excelled in his eleventh grade English class where he began writing stories. An avid reader of science fiction, writers like H. G. Wells, Edgar Allen Poe, Isaac Asimov, all helped to make him the writer he is today. He also enjoys comedians, like George Carlin, Red Skelton and Milton Berle. One time at a family gathering, he flabbergasted everybody by asking his mother if she "Followed the recipe" while making the biscuits? Stephen Mann and his wife spent their early years traveling the highways and byways of New England. Visiting places like Fort Knox in Maine, Wilson Castle, in Proctor, Vermont; Perry's Nut House, in Belfast, Maine. One year for Christmas, he gave his favorite brother-in-law an unusual present. It was five foot tall, twelve inches round, and painted fire-cracker red. It looked just like a giant stick of dynamite! IT WAS PRICELESS! In the summer of 1980, they started doing their family genealogy. Where they found out that besides being married, they both had a grandmother with the same last name. He has a lot of friends who are always asking if he has any new stories yet? SUMMARY

Where in the world could a fourteen year old child apply for a job which they start at the age of fifteen with no way of leaving until they are twenty seven years old? Where in the world? Great Britain. Stephen Mann writes of his experience as a boy entrant to the British Royal Navy, his despair then anger at finding that he could not escape from a world of arbitrary rules and personal violence. His humour and North London independent spirit however shines through and despite his frustrations, the cracking momentum of the book is maintained as we enjoy adventures with Stephen and his shipmates on the High Seas. This book describes Stephen's growing political awareness and his opposition to the war in Vietnam and also charts the battle to make a barbaric system of virtually press ganging children for 12 years, become a thing of the past. Stephen explains: "I was in the Royal Navy for five years and ninety three days, which is five years and ninety two days longer than I had wanted to be. "This was the 1960s. The music was fantastic, the fashion fabulous and revolution, freedom and equality were at the top of the political agenda. However, it was also a time when working class boys were encouraged to join the armed forces at the age of fifteen - and what many of these boys didn't fully realise was that once they'd signed on the dotted line there was no way out. For them the 1960s were not so great and a brutal and sadistic regime awaited them in their first year of training. "Whilst some boys accepted their fate, others tried to escape. The people I served with did so in a variety of ways - by pretending to be daft, punching Officers, deliberately disabling themselves or they just deserted. "As the political and anti-war movements of the 1960s began to influence me, my way out of the Royal Navy would take a different and surprising course." Sadism, Songs and Stolen Liberty is the story of these 'reluctant servicemen', their hardships and escapades - evocatively set against the unforgettable musical soundtrack of an era. Stephen concludes: "It was these wonderful songs of the 1960s that lifted my spirits, kept me sane and allowed me to mentally escape the worse times. I will be indebted to them forever."

In this lecture, we study Bezier and B-spline curves and surfaces, mathematical representations for free-form curves and surfaces that are common in CAD systems and are used to design aircraft and automobiles, as well as in modeling packages used by the computer animation industry. Bezier/B-splines represent polynomials and piecewise polynomials in a geometric manner using sets of control points that define the shape of the surface. The primary analysis tool used in this lecture is blossoming, which gives an elegant labeling of the control points that allows us to analyze their properties geometrically. Blossoming is used to explore both Bzier and B-spline curves, and in particular to investigate continuity properties, change of basis algorithms, forward differencing, B-spline knot multiplicity, and knot insertion algorithms. We also look at triangle diagrams (which are closely related to blossoming), direct manipulation of B-spline curves, NURBS curves, and triangular and tensor product surfaces.