A medieval Middle-Eastern literary epic which tells the story of Scheherazade, a Sassanid Queen, who must relate a series of stories to her malevolent husband, the King, to delay her execution. The stories are told over a period of one thousand and one nights, and every night she ends the story with a suspenseful situation, forcing the King to keep her alive for another day. The individual stor…
Basically the Equation of Time (EoT) is the difference between clock time and time seen on a sundial. This is comparing “clock time”, as a mechanical measurement of time, and the sundial being time determined by the position of the Sun at any given moment. The figures listed are for 00h and 12h . Using the EoT you can get fairly accurate determination of when Meridian Passage (Local Apparen…
For one hundred and thirty years, from its establishment in 1880 to 2010, Imperial Oil Company Ltd. was the largest petroleum company in Canada; in 2009, Suncor merged with Petro Canada and Imperial fell to second place. Even so, in 2018 Imperial remained among the top ten non-financial companies in Canada, ranked by revenues and assets. The third ranked company, Enbridg…
Despite intermittent upsurges of climate change scepticism among conservative politicians and journalists in the Anglosphere, there is now a near consensus among climate scientists – and indeed amongmost other scientists – that current levels of atmospheric greenhouse gas are sufficient to alter global weather patterns to possibly disastrous effect. Rec…
Plants are often considered of secondary importance to ani-mal or even insect species, even though they are equally threat-ened by rising temperatures and changing ecologies and function as cornerstones of any given ecology. Plants are vital resources for understanding current and future ecologies, and our parallel human culture and society. We hope to contribute to the revalu-ation of the sign…
Planet Earth is an ocean planet. We can hardly ignore the fact that the ocean covers almost two thirds of our planet. Since the dawn of time, humankind has had an ambivalent relationship with the immensity and hostility of this very specific environment. However, the ocean holds a strong attraction for human societies, with nearly 40% of the world’s population living less than 100 km from the…
In it’s broadest possible sense, music is defined as “organized sound.” This openended and safe definition is coherent regardless of era, style, culture, or the mechanics of musical organization. Each successive historical era produces musically artistic expressions of its own time, its own musical aura. The study of Music Theory is the means by which we investigate this. Among the commu…
The purāṇas are an important genre of Hindu literature.1 Together they constitute an authoritative archive—cosmogony and cosmology, theology and mythology as well as orthodoxy and orthopraxis—for Hindu traditions. Many important narratives relating to the deities Viṣṇu–Kṛṣṇa, Śiva and the great goddess Devī are found in their most authoritative form in pur…
The idea that we learn by interacting with our environment is probably the first to occur to us when we think about the nature of learning. When an infant plays, waves its arms, or looks about, it has no explicit teacher, but it does have a direct sensorimotor connection to its environment. Exercising this connection produces a wealth of information about cause and effect, about the consequence…
This open access edited collection contributes a new dimension to the study of mental health and psychiatry in the twentieth century. It takes the present literature beyond the ‘asylum and after’ paradigm to explore the multitude of spaces that have been permeated by concerns about mental well-being and illness. The chapters in this volume consciously attempt to break down institutional wal…