When I was initiated into sannyasa, I thought I had become a different person forever. The reality was far from it. The only solace: I was not the only one. Having met numerous seekers who visit our ashram to meet My Guru, Om Swami, I realized that most of them had similar woes. My failures were everyday failures for others just as much. They too were dancing to the fickle tunes of their unanchored and untamed minds. But there was hope. Simple instructions from the ingenious mind of My master rescued me. It is his infallible wisdom that I have tried to capture in this book. I hope the lessons in these pages bring you as much peace and clarity as they brought me.

    At his death last spring, Roueche left behind seven new narratives that have never been published in book form. This book collects these works along with one earlier classic--all relating true tales of strange illnesses, rare diseases, and the brilliant minds who race to understand and conquer them.

    Hodgkinson offer you a wry look inside the mirrored palaces of high culture.Read this book and you'll never again mistake Hegel for Engels, you'll know when precisely to drop Foucault's name into a conversation and how to pronounce "Borgesian," and you'll learn many more essential pointers for the intellectual life.

    of Maryland School of Medicine), offers case histories of the health problems of a dozen long-dead famous figures diagnosed from modern medical perspectives. Illustrations depict patients including the odd-looking Pharaoh Akhenaten, C

    Every religion has angels, Sylvia tells us. Different from spirit guides, angels are spiritual messengers who are available to help us if we will simply ask for their assistance. Sylvia goes on to discuss the properties of angels; the true nature of God, good, evil, and the Other Side; and explains how we can overcome guilt, accept ourselves, and thereby understand our own particular “contract.” In the second half of the program, Sylvia leads a meditation that invokes the presence of our angels and individual spirit guides, and invites them to communicate with us. We feel their protection, receive their healing, and with Sylvia’s encouragement, learn how to ask them for the help we desire.

    According to them, “intelligent machines” and big data will free us from work, educate our children, transform our environment, and even make religion more user-friendly. This is the story they’re telling us: that we should stop worrying and love our robot future. But just because you tell a story over and over again doesn’t make it true. Curtis White, one of our most brilliant and perceptive social critics, knows all about the danger of a seductive story, and in We, Robots, he tangles with the so-called thinkers who are convinced that the future is rose-colored and robotically enhanced. With tremendous erudition and a punchy wit, White argues that we must be skeptical of anyone who tries to sell us on technological inevitability. And he gives us an alternative set of stories: taking inspiration from artists as disparate as Sufjan Stevens, Lars von Trier, and François Rabelais, White shows us that by looking to art, we can imagine a different kind of future. No robots required.From the Hardcover edition.

    

    Starting a war 'to promote freedom and democracy' could in certain though rare circumstances be a justified act; but in the case of the Second Gulf War that began in 2003, which involved reacting to criminals hiding in one country (Al Qaeda in Afghanistan or Pakistan) by invading another country (Iraq), one of the main fronts has, dismayingly, been the home front, where the War on Terror takes the form of a War on Civil Liberties in the spurious name of security. To defend 'freedom and democracy', Western governments attack and diminish freedom and democracy in their own country. By this logic, someone will eventually have to invade the US and UK to restore freedom and democracy to them.'In this lucid and timely book, Grayling sets out what's at risk, engages with the arguments for and against examining the cases made by Isaiah Berlin and Ronald Dworkin on the one hand, and Roger Scruton and John Gray on the other, and finally proposes a different way to respond that makes defending the civil liberties on which western society is founded the cornerstone for defeating terrorism.

    New co-authors--Irl Bivens and Stephen Davis--from Davidson College; both distinguished educators and writers.* More emphasis on graphing calculators in exercises and examples, including CAS capabilities of graphing calculators.* More problems using tabular data and more emphasis on mathematical modeling.

    Now, as the first decade of the twenty-first century closes amid economic collapse and the seeming ruin of the American Dream, America's #1 rated progressive radio host sounds an urgent call to arms for building a better, more sustainable world-while there's still time. Offering not just an indictment of the failures that have courted economic, demographic, and environmental ruin, Hartmann also outlines five critical personal and policy solutions to bring us back from the brink. Threshold-like Jared Diamond's Collapse-is radical but rooted in common sense, illuminating the necessary next steps in the evolution of mainstream thinking.

    He was the undisputed finest high school player in America. He was the one NBA scouts drooled over, corporations dreamed of, event promoters begged for, and now fans clamor after. Never before had a high school basketball player been so highly touted or an eighteen-year-old athlete been the subject of such fascination. Maybe no basketball player in the world has had that level of attention.Now with the Cleveland Cavaliers, LeBron has become a certified NBA all-star. Love him or hate him, there is no denying that LeBron James is a force on the basketball court, and his rags to riches story is the stuff that dreams are made of.Ryan Jones has updated his smash hit book King James to incorporate everything that is LeBron: the controversy, the star power, the shoes, the cars, the hobnobbing with the world's most famous celebrities, and, of course, the game. This is a book for every fan of LeBron James and for anybody interested in reading about an NBA legend in the making.

    this is one of those rare books that will change your beliefs - and in doing so will change your life. tHE ANt AND tHE FERRARI offers readers a clear, navigable path through the big questions that confront us all today. What is the meaning of life? Can we be ethical beings in today's world? Can we know if there is life after death? Is there such a thing as Absolute truth? What caused the Big Bang and why should you care?

    Since its founding in 1997, Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction has published hundreds of brief nonfiction essays by writers around the world, each within that strict word count. Over the past 20 years, Brevity has become one of the longest-running and most popular online literary publications, a journal readers regularly return to for insightful essays from skilled writers at every stage of their careers. Featuring examples of nonfiction forms such as memoir, narrative, lyric, braided, hermit crab, and hybrid, The Best of Brevity brings you 84 of the best-loved and most memorable reader favorites, collected in print for the first time. Compressed to their essence, these essays glint with drama, grief, love, and anger, as well as innumerable other lived intensities, resulting in an anthology that is as varied as it is unforgettable, leaving the reader transformed.With contributions from Krys Malcolm Belc, Jenny Boully, Brian Doyle, Roxane Gay, Daisy Hernández, Michael Martone, Ander Monson, Patricia Park, Kristen Radtke Diane Seuss, Abigail Thomas, Jia Tolentino, and so many more, The Best of Brevity offers unparalleled diversity of style, form, and perspective for those interested in reading, writing, or teaching the flash nonfiction form.

    But he did not intend the metaphysics to stand apart from his scientific work, which included important investigations into physics, mathematics, and optics. In this book, Sorell shows that Descarates was, above all, an advocate and practitioner of the new mathematical approach to physics, and that he developed his philosophies to support his discoveries in the sciences.About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.

    Casti contemplates an imaginary evening of intellectual inquiry—a sort of “My Dinner with” not Andre, but five of the most brilliant thinkers of the twentieth century.Imagine, if you will, one stormy summer evening in 1949, as novelist and scientist C. P. Snow, Britain’s distinguished wartime science advisor and author of The Two Cultures, invites four singular guests to a sumptuous seven-course dinner at his alma mater, Christ’s College, Cambridge, to discuss one of the emerging scientific issues of the day: Can we build a machine that could duplicate human cognitive processes? The distinguished guest list for Snow’s dinner consists of physicist Erwin Schrodinger, inventor of wave mechanics; Ludwig Wittgenstein, the famous twentieth-century philosopher of language, who posited two completely contradictory theories of human thought in his lifetime; population geneticist/science popularizer J.B.S. Haldane; and Alan Turing, the mathematician/codebreaker who formulated the computing scheme that foreshadowed the logical structure of all modern computers. Capturing not only their unique personalities but also their particular stands on this fascinating issue, Casti dramatically shows what each of these great men might have argued about artificial intelligence, had they actually gathered for dinner that midsummer evening.With Snow acting as referee, a lively intellectual debate unfolds. Philosopher Wittgenstein argues that in order to become conscious, a machine would have to have life experiences similar to those of human beings—such as pain, joy, grief, or pleasure. Biologist Haldane offers the idea that mind is a separate entity from matter, so that regardless of how sophisticated the machine, only flesh can bond with that mysterious force called intelligence. Both physicist Schrodinger and, of course, computer pioneer Turing maintain that it is not the substance, but rather the organization of that substance, that makes a mind conscious.With great verve and skill, Casti recreates a unique and thrilling moment of time in the grand history of scientific ideas. Even readers who have already formed an opinion on artificial intelligence will be forced to reopen their minds on the subject upon reading this absorbing narrative. After almost four decades, the solutions to the epic scientific and philosophical problems posed over this meal in C. P. Snow’s old rooms at Christ’s College remains tantalizingly just out of reach, making this adventure into scientific speculation as valid today as it was in 1949.