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.

"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.

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

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.

"An examination of the frameworks of science and religion that provides a multi-cultural view of how they affect our perception of the truth"--Provided by publisher.

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.