A thirteen-year-old girl wakes up in a future where human emotions are extinct and people rely on personal-assistant robots to navigate daily life. Imagine a future in which many human emotions are extinct, and “emotional masseuses” try to help people recover those lost sensations. Individuals rely on personal-assistant robots to navigate daily life. Students are taught not to think but to employ search programs. Companies protect their intellectual property by erasing the memory of their employees. And then imagine what it would feel like to be a sweet, smart thirteen-year-old girl from the twenty-first century who wakes from a cryogenically induced sleep into this strange world. This is the compelling story told by Carme Torras in this prize-winning science fiction novel. We meet Celia, brought back to life when a cure is found for her formerly terminal disease, and Lu, Celia's adoptive mother, protective but mystified by her new daughter. There is Leo, a bioengineer, who is developing a “creativity prosthesis” to augment humans' atrophied capacities, and the eccentric robotics mogul Dr. Craft. And there is Silvana, an emotional masseuse who reads old books to research the power of emotion. Silvana sees Celia as a living, breathing example of the emotions and feelings that are now out of reach for most people. Torras, a prominent roboticist, weaves provocative ethical issues into her story. What kind of robots do we want when robot companions become as common as personal computers are now? Is it the responsibility of researchers to design robots that make the human mind evolve in a certain way? An appendix provides readers with a list of ethics questions raised by the book.

Poetry. Native American Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. VESTIGIAL (from the Latin vestigium, meaning "footprint") tracks a poetic narrative across multiple chronologies and scales--from the personal to the geologic. Following her debut collection RESTLESS CONTINENT (Litmus Press, 2016), Aja Couchois Duncan continues to investigate ecology and heritage as a story of entangled becoming, synchronizing movements of deep time with the transient substance of touch.As Duncan writes, "In VESTIGIAL, I am exploring evolution, biomedicine, gender, lust, climate change and loneliness though characters that inhabit multiple places in time. In this way, I am seeking to thread past, present and alternative futures in an effort to understand our current circumstances and envision their likely consequences. The book plumbs multiple disciplines and wisdoms, including geology, astronomy, archeology, ancestry, plant and animal wisdom. Through this grounding of the simultaneity of experience and our multitudinous perspectives, I am attempting to create a more authentic and indigenous narrative about aki, earth, and all of her inhabitants."It all begins with atoms and lightning and moves through the beadwork of a spine, the poem of existence. Aja Couchois Duncan turns her loving scalpel eye to the stuff of the world, the real biography--the singular chorus of thingness. Duncan's muscular writing glows through the skin in VESTIGIAL. I read it and felt changed."--Kim Shuck"VESTIGIAL is a flesh epic braiding time and bodies. Poet and librettist Aja Couchois Duncan writes, 'The story of evolution is a love story' and, here, the land, water, and air function as organs in her lovers' mercurial anatomies. Duncan renders her characters in a language binding them to a natural world, such that science and myth become twinned. The result is a poetry of precise resistance to worldviews that insist on cleaving the human from the environment. At scales simultaneously intimate and monumental, the poet resists the figurative to orchestrate eros, violence, and corporeal transformation. 'In the epigenetic drift, she is alternating between ancestry and an impossible future tense,' Duncan says of the VESTIGIAL's odaanisan. She could very well be saying that of her own visionary poetics."--Douglas Kearney

Omnibus 2: Saturn's Rings. Episodes 29-56. Reality, what a concept. Is life a puppet show and are we nothing but puppets? Could we really be living in a computer simulation? Through the ages, the conundrum of Reality has messed with the collective consciousness of humanity. The Allegory of Plato's Cave down through the ages to The Matrix. A chance meeting in the park leads two strangers to discover strange connections between themselves and the world, and in truth both had felt that perhaps there was something not quite right with the world, something different. They have both noticed improbable coincidences popping up in their lives, at an almost alarming regularity, and now, meeting, they witness strange signs in the heavens, and find themselves on a bizarre path that will make them question their very reality, and the reality of the world about them, and the universe itself. Do we live in a computer simulation?

Reality, what a concept. Is life a puppet show and are we nothing but puppets? A hidden world all about us, angels and demons, or is what we can touch and sense all there is? And now, the Simulation Hypothesis plagues us. Could we really be living in a computer simulation? Through the ages, the conundrum of Reality has messed with the collective consciousness of humanity. The Allegory of Plato's Cave down through the ages to The Matrix. A chance meeting in the park leads two strangers to discover strange connections between themselves and the world, and in truth both had felt that perhaps there was something not quite right with the world, something different. They have both noticed improbable coincidences popping up in their lives, at an almost alarming regularity, and now, meeting, they witness strange signs in the heavens, and find themselves on a bizarre path that will make them question their very reality, and the reality of the world about them, and the universe itself.

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For all the discussion in the media about creationism and 'Intelligent Design', virtually nothing has been said about the evidence in question - the evidence for evolution by natural selection. Yet, as this succinct and important book shows, that evidence is vast, varied, and magnificent, and drawn from many disparate fields of science. The very latest research is uncovering a stream of evidence revealing evolution in action - from the actual observation of a species splitting into two, to new fossil discoveries, to the deciphering of the evidence stored in our genome. Why Evolution is True weaves together the many threads of modern work in genetics, palaeontology, geology, molecular biology, anatomy, and development to demonstrate the 'indelible stamp' of the processes first proposed by Darwin. It is a crisp, lucid, and accessible statement that will leave no one with an open mind in any doubt about the truth of evolution.

If animals evolved through natural selection, then our bodies are undoubtedly home to numerous "evolutionary leftovers" known by the technical name "vestigial organs." While the existence of vestigial organs used to be a primary evidence used to support evolutionary theory, actual research into the design and function of the body show that these are not functionless leftovers, but are part of a coherent design. In this book, Jerry Bergman walks you through the anatomy of these "vestigial organs" and shows the important roles they play. Ignorance of how the body works can no longer be used as evidence that it was not designed.

In The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Victor Turner examines rituals of the Ndembu in Zambia and develops his now-famous concept of "Communitas." He characterizes it as an absolute inter-human relation beyond any form of structure.The Ritual Process has acquired the status of a small classic since these lectures were first published in 1969. Turner demonstrates how the analysis of ritual behavior and symbolism may be used as a key to understanding social structure and processes. He extends Van Gennep's notion of the "liminal phase" of rites of passage to a more general level, and applies it to gain understanding of a wide range of social phenomena. Once thought to be the "vestigial" organs of social conservatism, rituals are now seen as arenas in which social change may emerge and be absorbed into social practice.As Roger Abrahams writes in his foreword to the revised edition: "Turner argued from specific field data. His special eloquence resided in his ability to lay open a sub-Saharan African system of belief and practice in terms that took the reader beyond the exotic features of the group among whom he carried out his fieldwork, translating his experience into the terms of contemporary Western perceptions. Reflecting Turner's range of intellectual interests, the book emerged as exceptional and eccentric in many ways: yet it achieved its place within the intellectual world because it so successfully synthesized continental theory with the practices of ethnographic reports."