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All over the world people talk about God and argue endlessly about what God said and what, if anything, we should do about it. Do they know what are they talking about? Do they ever seriously consider what it might look like or feel like if God actually spoke to you? How could you tell, if someone said God spoke to them, whether they were deluded, bluffing, or high on drugs? The reflections, dialogues, and arguments in this book address such questions, often with humor, sometimes provocatively as when the author suggests the ancient gods have returned to invade the institutions of our great religions, or when two spirits, William and James, viewing the world from afar, voice their doubt as to whether the human species will ever attain the pinnacles of cooperation, reason, beauty, and love. Ancient texts from the Mayan Popol Vuh through the Bible to the Chinese classics are invoked, and the discoveries of modern science from anthropology to zoology are brought into play as the reader is gently led to an appreciation of the role of religious language in modern society.
With an emphasis on exploring measurable aspects of ancient narratives, Maths Meets Myths sets out to investigate age-old material with new techniques. This book collects, for the first time, novel quantitative approaches to studying sources from the past, such as chronicles, epics, folktales, and myths. It contributes significantly to recent efforts in bringing together natural scientists and humanities scholars in investigations aimed at achieving greater understanding of our cultural inheritance. Accordingly, each contribution reports on a modern quantitative approach applicable to narrative sources from the past, or describes those which would be amenable to such treatment and why they are important. This volume is a unique state-of-the-art compendium on an emerging research field which also addresses anyone with interests in quantitative approaches to humanities.
My uncle, the renowned Ingo Swann, was a man of mystery and intrigue. As one of the US Government’s top psychic spies, he held secrets that few knew and even fewer understood. One day, he confided in me with a hushed tone and a glint in his eye: “We are not alone on this planet.” This wasn’t entirely new to me. I had encountered numerous inexplicable events, but I couldn’t believe they were actually real. It just seemed too impossible. Years later, however, my curiosity drove me to learn more. Amidst this learning adventure, I stumbled upon a declassified briefing from 1973 stating a group of Nazis was to blame for releasing an arcane terror upon the world. Unless one is deeply roo...
Creation myths around the world reveal an intricate network of recurrent motifs. Many of these are counterintuitive and not widely known, describing a time when the sky was low, the stars did not yet shine, multiple suns appeared, the moon was brighter than the sun, no land existed, deities and mortals maintained frequent contact, a 'world axis' in the form of a tree, ladder or giant man connected the earth with the sky, a devastating flood or fire ended the old order, and so forth. The present work, in multiple volumes, aims to find an origin for this cross-culturally and internally consistent body of traditions in a series of extraordinary natural events relating especially to the earth's ...
The existence of an Indo-European linguistic family, allowing for the fact that several languages widely dispersed across Eurasia share numerous traits, has been demonstrated for several centuries now. But the underlying factors for this shared heritage have been fiercely debated by linguists, historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists. The leading theory, of which countless variations exist, argues that this similarity is best explained by the existence, at one given point in time and space, of a common language and corresponding population. This ancient, prehistoric, population would then have diffused across Eurasia, eventually leading to the variation observed in historical and mode...
For most of human history, we have had a close relationship with the stars. Once they shaped our religious beliefs, power structures, scientific advances and even our biology. But over the last few centuries we have separated ourselves from the universe that surrounds us. And it comes at a cost. The Human Cosmos is a tour of this history: from the Hall of the Bulls in Lascaux to Tahitian sailors navigating by the stars; from medieval monks grappling with the nature of time to Einstein realising that space and time are the same. It shows we need to rediscover the universe we inhabit, its effect on our health, and its potential for inspiration and revelation.
A fascinating and deeply researched investigation into the mysteries of flavor, from our ancestors' first bites to ongoing scientific advances in taste and today's "foodie" revolution. --
Neanderthals are the most-researched extinct members of genus Homo. They have been gone for between 28,000 and 40,000 years, far beyond the reach of cultural memories. An expanding number of archaeologists conclude that Neanderthals are, as genetics confirms, co-human with us whose lineage emerged in Africa about 300,000 years ago. Were they the same as us? No. Do archaeological discoveries of tools and behavioral clues indicate what may have been Neanderthal religion? Taking religion as spirituality realized in common, Hughson answers the controversial question with a conjecture assisted by anthropology. Neanderthals were hunter-gatherer animists associated with bears, burials, defleshed bo...
An examination of the Paleolithic and Neolithic communities that inhabited not only the Nile Valley and Delta, but also the Western and Eastern Deserts. The remarkable archaeology of pharaonic Egypt continues to captivate countless people worldwide but evidence for Egypt’s prehistoric or Stone Age past has been relatively neglected. This is perhaps understandable, as the archaeology of Stone Age Egypt often seems crude in comparison, and the number of works published on the subject is diminutive compared to those dealing with the revered ancient civilization that emerged in the Nile Valley some five thousand years ago. However, although less spectacular, the numerous remnants of prehistori...
The comprehensive compendium furnishes a quick and efficient entry point to many multiresolution techniques and facilitates the transition from an idea into a real project. It focuses on methods combining several soft computing techniques (fuzzy logic, neural networks, genetic algorithms) in a multiresolution framework.Illustrated with numerous vivid examples, this useful volume gives the reader the necessary theoretical background to decide which methods suit his/her needs.New materials and applications for multiresolution analysis are added, including notable research topics such as deep learning, graphs, and network analysis.