Subnature

We are conditioned over time to regard environmental forces such as dust, mud, gas, smoke, debris, weeds, and insects as inimical to architecture. Much of today's discussion about sustainable and green design revolves around efforts to clean or filter out these primitive elements. While mostly the direct result of human habitation, these 'subnatural forces' are nothing new. In fact, our ability to manage these forces has long defined the limits of civilized life. From its origins, architecture has been engaged in both fighting and embracing these so-called destructive forces. In Subnature, David Gissen, author of our critically acclaimed Big and Green, examines experimental work by today's leading designers, scholars, philosophers, and biologists that rejects the idea that humans can somehow recreate a purely natural world, free of the untidy elements that actually constitute nature. Each chapter provides an examination of a particular form of subnature and its actualization in contemporary design practice. The exhilarating and at times unsettling work featured in Subnature suggests an alternative view of natural processes and ecosystems and their relationships to human society and architecture. R&Sie(n)'s Mosquito Bottleneck house in Trinidad uses a skin that actually attracts mosquitoes and moves them through the building, while keeping them separate from the occupants. In his building designs the architect Philippe Rahm draws the dank air from the earth and the gasses and moisture from our breath to define new forms of spatial experience. In his Underground House, Mollier House, and Omnisport Hall, Rahm forces us to consider the odor of soil and the emissions from our body as the natural context of a future architecture. [Cero 9]'s design for the Magic Mountain captures excess heat emitted from a power generator in Ames, Iowa, to fuel a rose garden that embellishes the industrial site and creates a natural mountain rising above the city's skyline. Subnature looks beyond LEED ratings, green roofs, and solar panels toward a progressive architecture based on a radical new conception of nature.

The demand is exploding for complete, integrated systems that sense, process, manipulate, and control complex entities such as sound, images, text, motion, and environmental conditions. These systems, from hand-held devices to automotive sub-systems to aerospace vehicles, employ electronics to manage and adapt to a world that is, predominantly, neither digital nor electronic. To respond to this design challenge, the industry has developed and standardized VHDL-AMS, a unified design language for modeling digital, analog, mixed-signal, and mixed-technology systems. VHDL-AMS extends VHDL to bring the successful HDL modeling methodology of digital electronic systems design to these new design disciplines.Gregory Peterson and Darrell Teegarden join best-selling author Peter Ashenden in teaching designers how to use VHDL-AMS to model these complex systems. This comprehensive tutorial and reference provides detailed descriptions of both the syntax and semantics of the language and of successful modeling techniques. It assumes no previous knowledge of VHDL, but instead teaches VHDL and VHDL-AMS in an integrated fashion, just as it would be used by designers of these complex, integrated systems. Explores the design of an electric-powered, unmanned aerial vehicle system (UAV) in five separate case studies to illustrate mixed-signal, mixed-technology, power systems, communication systems, and full system modeling.

In the Revelation of St. John, spiritual worlds and spiritual entities appear both in images of the sensory world and in images of the mineral realm. This book disusses these two sides of world manifestation. It is often argued that the images of St. John's Revelations are intended in a purely symbolic way. If this is so, the mineral appears as a symbol for something of a soul-like and spiritual nature. The Revelator however, did not see symbols, but rather realities; even a symbol can be genuine only if something of the reality for which it stands shines through. It must, in a real way, be inwardly identical with what it intends, the essence from which it stems. Thus it must arise from the same reality; otherwise it contains no meaning. The images of the minerals in the Apocalypse are just as much reality as the minerals are on Earth. Neither is essential; both are simply manifestations of something essential. Hence, both are truly apocalyptic—the mineral we hold in our hand and the image we hold in our mind. They reveal themselves mutually. This book juxtaposes the objects of sensory appearance and natural-scientific research with sayings from the Revelation of St. John to express the joint background of the appearances. When we connect one with the other, it can lead to an encounter with the essence. This is an “esoteric mineralogy.” Friedrich Benesch enables a renewed encounter between the human being and mineral being, from which essence and future can then shine out. Anyone wanting to look more deeply into the Book of Revelations should read this beautifully illustrated, unique work on its meaning and its significance for both today and the future of humankind and the Earth.

The inner dimensions of health and illness that escape ordinary perception are explored here, with examples ranging from St. Teresa of Avila to sleepwalking.

Museums of all kinds – art, history, culture, science centers and heritage sites – are actively engaging with food through exhibitions, collections, and stories about food production, consumption, history, taste, and aesthetics. Food also plays a central role in their food courts, restaurants, cafes, gardens, and gift shops. Food and Museums is the first book to explore the diverse, complex relationship between museums and food. This edited collection features theoretical analysis from cultural historians, anthropologists, neuroscientists, and food studies scholars; interviews with museum professionals, artists and chefs; and critical case studies from a wide range of cultural institutions and museums to establish an interdisciplinary framework for the analysis of the role of food in museums. Exploring the richness and complexity of sensory, cultural, social, and political significance of food today as well as in the past, the book demonstrates how food is changing the current museological landscape. A fascinating look at contemporary museums through the lens of food, this is an essential read for students and researchers in museum studies, food studies, cultural studies, and sensory studies as well as museum and food professionals.

"We need changes in our attitudes, our understanding of illness, our acceptance of non-allopathic practitioners, the economics of how we pay for health care, and our entire professional medical-legal system in which medical boards often act within the law to protect and defend the guild of conventional medicine under the guise of 'scientific proof.'... I present a template that combines economics, psychology, medicine, physiology, and mythology. It can serve as support and guidance for making the changes necessary for a new model of medicine in the twenty-first century." --Dr. Robert J. Zieve Dr. Zieve presents a new paradigm for health care that shows us how to go beyond the limitations and severe deficiencies of our current sickness care system. It embraces and synthesizes the emerging models of integrative medicine, energy medicine, and energy psychology into an effective and affordable approach to healing for everyone. This guide is for both those wish to provide a more complete form of health care for their patients and also for those individuals who are prepared to make the necessary changes in daily life in order to initiate or maintain a movement toward healing. This includes understanding the daily disciplines of a healing process, the deeper psychological processes of illness, and the creative arts in their therapeutic roles.

Following on from John O'Loughlin's previous title So There, this work also takes the form of a mixture of aphorisms and maxims, or brief discursive observations on a variety of subjects of interest or concern to the author, coupled to numbered sequences of systematically-structured conclusions about salient aspects of the overall philosophy which, in this book, succeed those parts (one and three) specifically given to the aphoristic material, as though to sum-up or clarify, on a more philosophically intensive basis, what had been more discursively observed. Of course, there is more to it than that, and the author would be lying if he didn't also add that this title both refines upon and extends beyond some of the observations and conclusions of the previous one, thereby in a sense bringing this phase of his philosophy to what he holds to be an ideological peak, beyond which he has no intention of going, since little or no progress could, so far as he is concerned, be made short of one's adopting the philosophical equivalent of wings and flying off into space. Therefore Mr O'Loughlin believes he has reached if not the end then almost certainly the highest summit so far of his intellectual journey, summing up, in a nutshell, what it has taken him the best part of four decades to arrive at, experience coupled to observation leading to truly conclusive results, the credibility of which it would be difficult if not impossible to logically deny. - A Centretruths Editorial

Mental illnesses are too often seen only in abstract terms. In keeping with this, mainstream psychology, which seldom acknowledges the psyche or soul, relies increasingly on pharmaceutical treatment. In his unique approach to anthroposophical psychology, or "psychosophy," William Bento views imbalances of the human soul in an experiential and human way. Basing his views on the work of Rudolf Steiner, Bento looks not only at the human body, soul, and spirit, but also at the way the whole environment of physical phenomena, life forces, and spirit beings affects us as individuals. Going well beyond our immediate, earthly surroundings, the author considers the cosmic effects of sun, planets and stars, offering a holistic view of the human soul. This is a valuable addition to the field of anthroposophical psychology and to the study of spiritual science as a whole. CONTENTS: Psychotherapy in the Light of Anthroposophy Obsessions, Compulsions, and Addictions: Disorders of Our Time The Myths of Depression and Mania Psychosis or Initiation? The Human Heart: Source and Substance of the Holy Grail