Depth psychologist and wilderness guide Bill Plotkin presents a model for a human life span rooted in the cycles and qualities of the natural world, a blueprint for individual development that ultimately yields a strategy for cultural transformation.With evocative language and personal stories, including those of elders Thomas Berry and Joanna Macy, this book defines eight stages of human life - Innocent, Explorer, Thespian, Wanderer, Soul Apprentice, Artisan, Master, and Sage - and describes the challenges and benefits of each. Plotkin offers a way of progressing from our current egocentric, aggressively competitive, consumer society to an ecocentric, soul-based one that is sustainable, cooperative, and compassionate. At once a primer on human development and a manifesto for change, Nature and the Human Soul fashions a template for a more mature, fulfilling, and purposeful life - and a better world.

    I’m Tim. I’m a single cell in society’s body. U.S. society, to be specific.So let me explain why we’re here.As a writer and a generally thinky person, I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking about the society I live in, and societies in general. I’ve always imagined society as a kind of giant human—a living organism like each of us, only much bigger.When you’re a single cell in the body of a giant, it’s hard to understand what the giant’s doing, or why it is the way it is, because you can’t really zoom out and look at the whole thing all at once. But we do our best.The thing is, when I’ve recently tried to imagine what society might look like, I haven’t really been picturing this:Giant stick figure: "I am grown up."Based on what I see around me, in person and online, it seems like my society is actually more like this:Giant stick figure throwing a giant tantrum because their chocolate ice cream fell on the ground.Individual humans grow older as they age—but it kind of seems like the giant human I live in has been getting more childish each year that goes by.So I decided to write a blog post about this. But then something else happened.When I told people I was planning to write a post about society, and the way people are acting, and the way the media is acting, and the way the government is acting, and the way everyone else is acting, people kept saying the same thing to me.Don’t do it. Don’t touch it. Write about something else. Anything else. It’s just not worth it.They were right. With so many non-controversial topics to write about, why take on something so loaded and risk alienating a ton of readers? I listened to people’s warnings, and I thought about moving on to something else, but then I was like, “Wait what? I live inside a giant and the giant is having a six-year-old meltdown in the grocery store candy section and that’s a not-okay thing for me to talk about?”It hit me that what I really needed to write about was that—about why it’s perilous to write about society."

    Scientists have made progress: computers can now beat chess grandmasters and help prevent terrorist attacks. Yet we still await a machine that exhibits the rich complexity of human thought — one that doesn’t just crunch numbers, or take us to a relevant Web page, but understands us and gives us what we need.That vision has driven a team of engineers at IBM. Over three years, they created “Watson” and prepared it for a showdown on Jeopardy!, where it would take on two of the game’s all-time champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, in a nationally televised event. Final Jeopardy is the entertaining, illuminating story of that computer and that epic match.It’s a classic tale of Man vs. Machine. Like its human competitors, Watson has to understand language, including puns and irony, and master everything from history, literature, and science to arts, entertainment, and game strategy. After years of training, Watson can find the scrambled state capital in “Hair Gel” (“What is Raleigh?”) and even come up with the facial accessory that made Moshe Dayan recognizable worldwide (“What is an eye patch?”). Watson may just be the smartest machine on earth.Final Jeopardy traces the arc of Watson’s “life,” from its birth in the IBM labs to its big night on the podium. We meet Hollywood moguls and Jeopardy! masters, genius computer programmers and ambitious scientists, including Watson’s eccentric creator, David Ferrucci. We gain access to Ferrucci’s War Room, where the IBM team works tirelessly to boost Watson’s speed to the buzzer, improve its performance in “train wreck” categories (such as “Books in Español”), and fix glitches like the speech defect Watson developed during its testing phase, when it started adding a d to words ending in n (“What is Pakistand?”).Much is at stake, especially for IBM. A new generation of Watsons could transform medicine, the law, marketing, even science itself, as machines process huge amounts of data at lightning speed, answer our questions, and possibly come up with new hypotheses.Showdown aside, it’s clear that the future has arrived. But with it come questions: Where does it leave humans? What will Watson’s heirs be capable of in ten or twenty years? Is it time to declare defeat in the realm of facts? What should we teach our children? And what should we carry around in our own heads?Final Jeopardy takes on these questions and more in a narrative that’s as fast and fun as the game itself. Baker shows us how smart machines will fit into our world — and how they’ll disrupt it. www.finaljeopardy.net

    In this recession, people are more interested than ever in learning how to use their mind to attract what they want in life. What exactly is the law of attraction? It is a universal law which states, "What we focus on, we attract toward ourselves." Or another way to state it is, "What we spend our time and energy focusing on will eventually come to us." That of course, is a major oversimplification. Using the mind to attract what we want is nothing new. It is considered to have started with the release of the famous book, "The Science Of Getting Rich" by Wallace Wattles in 1910. Since then, a multitude of books have been written teaching the law of attraction. The most well known is the book, "The Secret" released in 2006, which was based on "The Science Of Getting Rich". An excellent movie of "The Secret" was subsequently released based on the book. While the movie was very good, the various teachers featured in it admitted that the information was incomplete. This resulted in many people being disappointed and confused with how to use the law of attraction to get what they wanted. It was necessary to go searching all over for additional information on this subject. For the average individual, this was not an easy task by any means. Dr. David Che has been fascinated with the law of attraction since he was a child. He has studied many good books on the law of attraction. But at the same time, he has also come across many books which are difficult to understand and apply practically, especially for the beginner. Using his simplistic approach to teaching the law of attraction to people, he was constantly asked, "Is there ONE book that could explain the most important concepts in a manner anyone would be able to understand and apply?" His new book, "Total Law Of Attraction" is the answer. Inside "Total Law Of Attraction", Dr. Che avoids the usual motivational approach and goes straight to the point. He explains how modern quantum physics is 'proving' that our thoughts and especially our emotions, create our physical reality. Dr. Che goes in depth on the subject of the subconscious mind. This is of extreme fundamental importance to understanding the law of attraction, but it is amazing how often it is neglected. In his 1910, Wallace Wattles used a term called "formless substance". Dr. Che fully explains in modern day terminology what exactly that substance is using quantum physics. Using the law of attraction to successfully attract our desires is a scientific process and requires one to understand many details for it to work properly. Dr. Che doesn't leave anything out as he explains every small detail in the process in an easy to read, common sense style.

    This manual will help train wellness coaches—a group comprised of fitness professionals, including personal trainers, dieticians, nurses, and physical therapists—in the techniques and concepts to work with individuals on improving all areas of wellness including fitness, nutrition, weight, stress, and management of life issues that impact health.

    Robert Fritz further develops his special insights that he introduced in his best selling book The Path of Least Resistance. In Your Life As Art, Fritz shows the relationship among the mechanics, the orientation, and the depth of the human spirit within the creative process, and how your life itself can be made like a work of art. Your Life As Art breaks new ground, shakes up the status quo, and, at once, is common sense and revolutionary insight that can change the way you understand the dynamics of your life-building process.

    Welcome to laughing until it hurts while covered in bodily fluids. Welcome to simple math at very high stakes. Welcome to an incredibly inappropriate sense of humor. Welcome to serving people on the most stressful days of their lives. Welcome to putting your hands in places you never imagined they'd be. Welcome to your front row seat to the ballad of life and death. That's not the welcome that this nurse was looking for, but that's the one he got. Irreverent and audacious, this brutally honest memoir covers what it’s like to come of age in an American Hospital. Welcome to a rollicking peak behind the curtain to what medical providers, and the health care system, are truly like.

    Now, two science professors give us the tools to dismantle misinformation and think clearly in a world of fake news and bad data.It's increasingly difficult to know what's true. Misinformation, disinformation, and fake news abound. Our media environment has become hyperpartisan. Science is conducted by press release. Startup culture elevates bullshit to high art. We are fairly well equipped to spot the sort of old-school bullshit that is based in fancy rhetoric and weasel words, but most of us don't feel qualified to challenge the avalanche of new-school bullshit presented in the language of math, science, or statistics. In Calling Bullshit, Professors Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West give us a set of powerful tools to cut through the most intimidating data.You don't need a lot of technical expertise to call out problems with data. Are the numbers or results too good or too dramatic to be true? Is the claim comparing like with like? Is it confirming your personal bias? Drawing on a deep well of expertise in statistics and computational biology, Bergstrom and West exuberantly unpack examples of selection bias and muddled data visualization, distinguish between correlation and causation, and examine the susceptibility of science to modern bullshit.We have always needed people who call bullshit when necessary, whether within a circle of friends, a community of scholars, or the citizenry of a nation. Now that bullshit has evolved, we need to relearn the art of skepticism.

    He tells of the Nazi cult of the primeval German forest; the play of Christian and pagan myth in Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers; and the duel between a monumental sculptor and a feminist gadfly on the slopes of Mount Rushmore. The result is a triumphant work of history, naturalism, mythology, and art. "A work of great ambition and enormous intellectual scope...consistently provocative and revealing."--New York Times"Extraordinary...a summary cannot convey the riches of this book. It will absorb, instruct, and fascinate."--New York Review of Books

    He asks how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation. How does this affect us? How can we do things differently?Sand Talk provides a template for living. It’s about how lines and symbols and shapes can help us make sense of the world. It’s about how we learn and how we remember. It’s about talking to everybody and listening carefully. It’s about finding different ways to look at things.Most of all it’s about Indigenous thinking, and how it can save the world.

    In this small volume, Miranda Lundy presents a unique introduction to this most ancient and timeless of universal sciences.Sacred Geometry demonstrates what happens to space in two dimensions - a subject last flowering in the art, science and architecture of the Renaissance and seen in the designs of Stonehenge, mosque decorations and church windows. With exquisite hand-drawn images throughout showing the relationship between shapes, the patterns of coin circles, and the definition of the golden section, it will forever alter the way in which you look at a triangle, hexagon, arch, or spiral.

    But the dot, though perfect in every way, only had eyes for a wild and unkempt squiggle. All of the line's romantic dreams were in vain, until he discovered...angles! Now, with newfound self-expression, he can be anything he wants to be--a square, a triangle, a parallelogram....And that's just the beginning!First published in 1963 and made into an Academy Award-winning animated short film, here is a supremely witty love story with a twist that reveals profound truths about relationships--both human and mathematical--sure to tickle lovers of all ages.