Universal Impulse Research Articles

The Impact of Music on Orchid plants Growth in Polyhouse Environments

Nature and music, two seemingly disparate elements of human experience, are deeply interconnected in ways that resonate across cultures and time. Both evoke emotions, stir the soul, and inspire creativity, offering profound insights into the human condition and our relationship with the world around us. In essence, nature and music are two expressions of the same universal impulse—the longing to connect with something greater than ourselves, to find beauty and meaning in the world around us. Whether we're listening to the songs of birds at dawn or the symphonies of Beethoven, we are reminded of our place in the vast tapestry of creation, where every note, every sound, is a testament to the wonder and mystery of existence. By carefully considering the environmental factors and designing experiments that account for them, researchers can gain a better understanding of how music influences plant growth and optimize its use in agricultural and horticultural practices. This research paper investigates the potential effects of music on orchid growth within polyhouse environments. Orchids are renowned for their delicate beauty and are cultivated worldwide, often in controlled environments like polyhouses. While studies have explored the influence of various environmental factors on orchid growth, the impact of music remains relatively unexplored. This study aims to fill this gap by examining how exposure to music may affect the growth, development, and overall health of orchids in polyhouse conditions. The research employs a combination of experimental methods, including controlled trials, measurements of plant growth parameters, and analysis of physiological indicators. Additionally, the study considers factors such as the type of music, frequency, volume, and duration of exposure. The findings of this research contribute to our understanding of the complex relationship between plants and their acoustic environment, with potential implications for optimizing orchid cultivation practices in polyhouse settings.

“Selecting between the dream and the reality”: The Mexican Revolution in All the Pretty Horses

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the relationship of four Mexican characters in Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses and their rhetorical use of the Mexican Revolution in conversation with John Grady. Rather than these characters being shaped by the revolution, analysis of their historical embellishments, omissions, and fabrications show them to instead imagine the revolution as a history that validates their individual perspectives. In so doing, they reflect John Grady’s desire to imagine a mythical cowboy past that can be lived in Mexico. These similarities therefore suggest that John Grady’s cowboy fantasies arise from a universal human desire rather than the flaws of an individual person, age, or country. By John Grady’s ultimate removal from Mexico and confession to the Texas judge, he may in fact be the only character in the novel who attempts to resist the universal impulse to turn history into self-justification.

Spiritualitás a vallásfenomenológia és pasztorálpszichológia horizontján/2

"Spirituality at the Horizon of Religious Phenomenology and Pastoral Psychology/2. We are living in a designer world, where not only the circumstances but our gods will be created consciously. We hunger for a god. Choosing an inadequate god, a god too small to transcend our limitations and who, therefore, can neither save nor transform us drives us to keep hunting. This study outlines the phenomenology of Christian spirituality, religious practice and highlights their working field. We find correlation between spirituality and spiritual well-being and happiness, factors that contribute to a positive personal development. We are condemned to meaning. There is a universal impulse to endow our joys and sorrows with meaning. Christian spirituality is a condition for us to reframe and understand our life perspectives and reach the “Courage to Be” (Tillich). Keywords: interpersonal relationship, spiritual intelligence, spiritual practice, spiritual communication, primary spiritual experience, existential fear, crisis, thankfulness, forgiveness, rites, well-being "

Boulders in the Stream: The Lineage and Founding of the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness

AbstractThe founding of the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness (SAC) can only be understood within the cultural context of its heritage. This paper is an historical narrative tracing the intellectual lineage of the SAC. The immediate causes were a series of symposia in 1974, including several on the challenge to anthropology represented by Carlos Castaneda, who attacked the way a critical part of anthropology was conducted. The argument in his own narrative was that one could not understand the shamanic world view without becoming a shaman. No informant could ever convey this, because so much of it was experiential. It could not be properly known unless one entered with sincerity into the experience, as a participant not just an observer. Two insights central to this thesis are particularly relevant to SAC: an aspect of human consciousness exists independent of time and space susceptible to volitional control; and, there is an interconnection between all life forms, which must be understood if the universal impulse humans feel toward the spiritual component of their lives is to properly mature. The SAC can be seen in pure Kuhnian terms as one response to the reassessment that Castaneda forced on anthropology.

Spiritualitás a vallásfenomenológia és pasztorálpszichológia horizontján

"Spirituality at the Horizon of Religious Phenomenology and Pastoral Psychology. We are living in a designer world, where not only the circumstances but our gods will be created consciously. We hunger for a God. Choosing an inadequate god, a god too small to transcend our limitations and who therefore can neither save nor transform us, drives us to keep hunting. This study reviews the phenomenology of Christian spirituality, religious practice and places special emphasis on these areas. We can find a correlation between spirituality and spiritual well-being and happiness, factors which contribute to a positive personal development. We are condemned to meaning. There is a universal impulse to assign meaning to our joys and sorrows. Christian spirituality is a condition for us to reframe and understand our life perspectives and reach the “Courage to be” (Tillich). Keywords: spirituality, phenomenology, spiritual well-being, pastoral psychology "

Consequences of the conflation of xiao and filial piety in English

Abstract This article examines the development over time of the English expression “filial piety” in order to document how, at least partly in response to pressure from an equivalence that is established with the Chinese term xiao (孝) in the seventeenth century, the term takes on new and increasingly negative connotations in English. As an important concept in Chinese philosophy, xiao occurs in many important early texts, including the Confucian Analects and, although the way the term is interpreted varies over time, remains central to many debates about Chinese culture right to this day. As the link between filial piety and xiao strengthens through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “filial piety” thus unsurprisingly becomes identified as one of a small group of key terms that were increasingly thought to explain all differences between the British and the Chinese. This article examines how the term “filial piety” evolves from a natural and universal impulse due to its connection with Christianity, with China initially as a particularly good example of this universal from whom everyone can learn, through various increasingly negative shifts due to the perceived conflict between filial piety and romantic love, as well as its increasing association with the Chinese, who by the end of the nineteenth century were seen as held back by the extreme nature of their practices. Today, filial piety as a term is seen as mainly or entirely local and specific to China, and by extension, something potentially holding it back from modernity.

Reassessing Modernisms in Light of Jerome Rothenberg’s Work

More than moments in history, the complex terms “modernism” and “modernity” need reassessing. Therefore, by using Rothenberg’s work as a point of departure for a wider reassessment of modernisms, this paper aims at revisiting not only 1914-1945 avant-garde American poetry, but also earlier and later international outputs (including performance, magic, ritual, oral, and outsider poetry). Embracing folklore and turning away from epic poetry, Rothenberg discloses some of the predecessors and successors of modernism, as well as the lesser-known acts of their canonized yet wobbly time frame. As a poet and anthologist, he militates for a dialogic representation of the multiple identities that the radical poets—witnesses, namers and tricksters—embody in their struggle against univocity and cultural hegemony. This paper first sets out to explore Rothenberg’s handling of the sources preceding the poetic avant-garde’s surfacing at the beginning of the 20th century. Then it addresses the issue of poetry and socio-political engagement, spanning the 1910-1970 era. Finally, it illustrates how Rothenberg’s anthologies map out the Pan-American and global inscriptions of modernisms on a wider historical and geographical scope. If Rothenberg’s work highlights the universal impulse of the most radical trends of international modernisms, it also defines poetic resistance as a contradictory yet necessary contextual response to the call of History.

Castaing-Taylor and Paravel’s GoPro Sensorium: Leviathan (2012), Experimental Documentary, and Subjective Sounds

Ethnographic film is documentary's avant-garde. Who is more self-conscious than an anthropologist with a movie camera?-J. HobermanFilm language is language of moving, seeing, and hearing. More than any other medium or art form, film uses experience to express experience.-Ilsa Barbash and Lucien Taylor (1)The term documentary, at first glance, can be considered an oxymoron at worst or a hybrid category at best that in either case illuminates assumed dialectical tensions between formal experimentation and cultural representation.1 Experimental documentary filmmaking conflates this dichotomy at level of aesthetics, or as Stella Bruzzi puts it, aestheticization of a given reality (9). The use of expressive, cinematic techniques, often celebrated in fictional filmmaking as an imaginative means for filmmaker to engage and enhance emotional involvement of viewer with filmmaker's stories and characters, often meets critical resistance when applied to documentary forms, including those whose origins are not necessarily related to their cinematic incarnations. Erik Barnouw, for example, in his seminal book Documentary: A History of Non-Fiction Film (1993), categorizes documentaries into nonfiction conventions or trends that existed before advent of documentary filmmaking with terms such as explorer, reporter, advocate, poet, and observer, among others. Barnouw's classification relates closer to the essay, diary, autobiography, notebook, editorial, evocation, eulogy, exhortation, description or report (Nichols, Introduction 72). These conceptual, and largely literary, nonfiction templates provide a reference point for how experimentation in popular imagination can be preconceived as counterintuitive to nonfiction's enterprise for verifiable knowledge. Elsewhere, John Corner points out that application of documentary aesthetics not been surprisingly framed by an interest in cognition, in how documentaries construct and project knowledge and use of this by viewers (20-21). Rather, in documentary's quest to capture visible evidence of its social subject, use of expressive cinematic techniques in nonfictional modes-such as dynamic dolly camera movement in Alain Resnais's Nuit et Brouillard [Night and Fog] (1955); stylized, noir-like cinematography and reenactments in Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line (1988); and kinetic music video editing with staged musical numbers in Alma Har'el's Bombay Beach (2011)-short-circuits this supposed link to unmediated knowledge. In more extreme visual measures, experimental documentary bypasses it altogether.The use of formal experimentation with cultural representation does more than just dismantle universal impulse toward discourse of objectivity in mainstream documentary filmmaking-it is also a discourse that itself has lost creditability with wider acceptance, or at least acknowledgment, that any form of documentary filmmaking is inherently subjective. Theorists such as Trinh T. Minh-ha notably refute definitions of documentary as a filmic form or approach altogether, despite its cinematic tradition, due to its untenable conflation of fixed notions of truth with meaning. She argues that [t]ruth, even when 'caught on run,' does not yield itself either in names or in (filmic) frames; and meaning should be prevented from coming to closure at what is said and what is shown (92). documentaries can offer, at best in her estimation, is a visual representation of a meaning that is already once removed from what it purports to signify. She provocatively asks: What is one to do with films which set out to determine truth from falsity while visibility of this truth lies precisely in fact that it is false? (92). Although this debate continues, experimental documentary offers recourse in its acknowledgment of fluctuation of both truth and meaning in a nonfiction filmic form. …

METAPHOR OF FLIGHT IN TONI MORRISON'S NOVEL „SONG OF SOLOMON“

Članak se bavi analizom metafore leta u romanu Toni Morison Song of Solomon. Autorka koristi legendu o afričkim robovima koji su mogli da lete kako bi naglasila dualnost metafore leta i njenu subverzivnu ulogu koja omogućava različite interpretacije. Kompleksnost metafore leta u romanu Toni Morison zahteva upotrebu nekoliko književno-teorijskih okvira tako da će se u članku koristiti okvir magijskog realizma, praksa marginalizacije i označavanja pripadnika manjinskih grupa kao Drugog onako kako se tom temom bavio Edvard Said u svom delu Orijentalizam i Jungov koncept arhetipa i putovanja mitskog heroja. Fokus članka je posebno na korišćenju magijskog realizma i spajanju master narativa zapadne civilizacije sa legendama koje potiču iz afroameričke zajednice kako bi se preispitao process konstrukcije istorije i zajednice. Morison u prvi plan stavlja univerzalnost leta kao jednog od ljudskih impulsa koji može da se nađe i u zapadnoj, afričkoj i afroameričkoj kulturi čime pruža validnost svojim likovima i njihovoj sposobnosti da lete.

Switching degenerate diffusion PDE filter based on impulselike probability for universal impulse noise removal

In this paper, a switching degenerate diffusion partial differential equation filter (SDDPDE) is developed by introducing the switching operators for reducing all kinds of impulse noise, and especially for images having a mixture of salt-and-pepper impulse noise and random-valued impulse noise which is a shortage for most of the existing filtering models. Our SDDPDE consists of the coarse and fine filtering stages. In the coarse filtering stages, the switching operator depends on a simple noise detector. In the fine filtering stages, we introduce the notion of impulselike probability, and the switching operator depends on both a simple noise detector and impulselike probability. Our SDDPDE will denoise noise pixels detected by the coarse detector while further modify the so-called noise-free pixels according to impulselike probability. The main advantages of our SDDPDE over published approaches are its simplicity and universality. In addition, we demonstrate the performance of our SDDPDE via application to three standard test images, corrupted by salt-and-pepper impulse noise, random-valued impulse noise and mixed impulse noise with high-noise levels, and the comparison with the other well-known filters. Experimental results show that our SDDPDE achieves high peak signal-to-noise ratio and better visual effect.

A Universal Impulse Noise Filter with an Impulse Detector and Nonlocal Means

In this paper, we propose an efficient filter for universal impulse noise removal. Operation is carried out in two stages: impulse detection followed by filtering. For detection, a robust local image statistic, called the extremum compression rank-order absolute difference (ECROAD), is designed to detect impulse noise in an image. For filtering, a universal impulse noise filter is proposed by combining the ECROAD statistic with the nonlocal means (NLM). The inherited switching behavior will preserve image details by selecting possible “noise pixels” for processing. Meanwhile, the joint impulsive weight is able to avoid the effect of impulsive components in restoring candidates. Simulation results show that the proposed filter produces excellent results and outperforms most existing filters for different impulse noise models.

Consciousness Studies and a Transformation of the Western Worldview

The emerging field of consciousness studies offers the perspective we need to make our global human community sustainable.

An efficient implementation of switching median filter with boundary discriminative noise detection for image corrupted by impulse noise

Switching Median Filter with Boundary Discriminative Noise Detection (BDND) is one of the useful methods that are capable to restore digital images which have been extremely corrupted by universal impulse noise. Following the fundamental framework of the switching median filter, the construction of BDND can be divided into two stages. The first stage classifies the pixels into either “noise” or “noise-free” pixels, while the second stage restores the image by changing only the intensity values of the “noise” pixels. Unfortunately, the originally proposed BDND employs sorting operations in both of its stages. This condition makes the originally proposed BDND computationally expensive. Therefore, in this paper, an implementation of BDND with reduced computational time is suggested. This reduction is achieved mainly by manipulating the local histograms’ properties. Experimental results show that the proposed implementation successfully produces the same results as the originally proposed BDND, but with much shorter processing time. Key words: Digital image processing, impulse noise, median filter.

High Society. Mind‐altering Drugs in History and Culture

High Society explores the spectrum of mind-altering substances across the globe and throughout history. Beautifully illustrated with rarely seen material, this striking, lyrical and rigorously researched book puts its controversial subject into the widest possible context. Every society is a high society. Every day, people drink coffee on European terraces and kava in Pacific villages, sniff cocaine in American suburbs and petrol in Aborigine slums, chew betel nut in Indonesian markets and coca leaf on Andean mountainsides, swallow ecstasy tablets in the clubs of Amsterdam and opium pills in the deserts of Rajasthan, and smoke ya'aba in Thai nightclubs, hashish in Himalayan temples and tobacco in every nation on earth. Acclaimed cultural historian Mike Jay paints vivid portraits of the roles that drugs playas medicines, religious sacraments, status symbols and coveted trade goods. He traces the understanding of intoxicants from the botanicals of the classical world through the mind-bending self-experiments of early scientists to the present 'war on drugs', and reveals how the international trade in substances such as tobacco, tea and opium shaped the modern world CONTENTS A Universal Impulse High Societies â?¢ The Evolution of Drugs â?¢ Animal Intoxication â?¢ Drugs and Shamanism â?¢ Drugs and Culture â?¢ The Culture of Kava â?¢ The Culture of Betel â?¢ Drug Prohibitions â?¢ Drug Subcultures â?¢ The Cultures of Ecstasy From Apothecary to Laboratory What Is a Drug? â?¢ Drugs in Antiquity â?¢ Renaissance Herbals â?¢ Witches and Flying Ointments â?¢ The Invention of Laudanum â?¢ Linnaeus and the Enlightenment â?¢ The First Synthetic Drugs â?¢ Opium and the Romantics â?¢ The Club des Haschischins â?¢ Freud and Cocaine â?¢ Addiction and Drug Control â?¢ Mescaline, LSD and Beyond â?¢ Drugs of the Future The Drugs Trade Drugs of the New World â?¢ The Psychoactive Revolution â?¢ Tobacco in China, Tea in Europe â?¢ The Opium Wars â?¢ The Anti-Opium campaign â?¢ Temperance and Prohibition â?¢ The â?~War on Drugsâ?T â?¢ Epilogue: The Decline of Tobacco

Cluster-based adaptive fuzzy switching median filter for universal impulse noise reduction

In this paper, we present a novel method for the removal of impulse noise from digital images. The proposed filter, called the Cluster-based Adaptive Fuzzy Switching Median (CAFSM), is composed of a cascaded easyto- implement impulse detector and a detail preserving noise filter. Initially, the impulse detector classifies any possible impulsive noise pixels. Subsequently, the filtering phase replaces the detected noise pixels. In addition, the filtering phase employs fuzzy reasoning to deal with uncertainties present in local information. Contrary to many existing filters that only focus on a particular impulse noise model, the CAFSM filter is capable of filtering all kinds of impulse noise -the random-valued and/or fixed-valued impulse noise models. Extensive simulations conducted on 100 monochrome images under a wide range of noise densities show that the CAFSM filter substantially outperforms other state-of-the-art impulse noise filters. Furthermore, the relatively fast processing time suggests the CAFSM filter’s applicability in consumer electronic products such as digital cameras <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> .

Public Theology in the Market State

AbstractThe accepted view that the modern state arose out of the 'wars of religion' is countered with evidence that the late fifteenth century reification of the state used a new category of religion as a human universal impulse to disempower the church and contain the church within the bounds of the state. As a further five successive forms of the state have come into existence new forms of communal and religious life have emerged: first, religious toleration; secondly, the development of a new 'public' realm; thirdly, the denominational form of church; fourthly, the appearance of mass media; fifthly, the embedding of the private citizen in a media world. In this last context either the church opts to reify the denominational church emphasizing individual democratic religious experience, or it realizes that an eschatological view of the gospel calls it to be a public church with a public theology.

From Domestic to Global Solidarity: The Dialectic of the Particular and Universal in the Building of Social Solidarity

Contemporary moral and political philosophers who analyze the concept of solidarity tend to be divided between (philosophical) pragmatic communitarians and neo-Kantian universalists. The pragmatic communitarians contend that the bonds of mutual care that characterize a solidaristic community are constituted within particular societies where members share a strong common identity. 1 To construct a “we,” these theorists argue, particular groups define themselves against an “other.” In contrast, those writing in the Rawlsian or neo-Kantian tradition claim that human cooperative endeavors can only be sustained over time if carried out under just conditions of mutual respect. Thus, Charles Beitz and Thomas Pogge contend that today’s interdependent global society morally necessitates us to extend Rawls’s “difference principle” across borders. 2 The communitarian position emphasizes the exclusionary side of democratic sovereignty. The demos is self-defined, and, in the absence of a global state, must exclude others. But an overly pragmatic defense of particularism denies the universal impulse of democracy’s commitment to the equal moral worth of persons. A conception of community membership as static and given negates the historical reality that social movements of the excluded resort to universalist arguments when demanding to be included in the democratic polity. The egalitarian logic of democratic solidarity involves the equitable sharing of the risks, burdens, and opportunities of an interdependent society across lines of race, gender, and class. Thus, particular movements for democratic inclusion inevitably press their potential fellow citizens toward a more capacious and universal conception of equality. But, thus far, the sharing of social risk has only been achieved at the level of the state (with some social and human rights being institutionalized on a regional level within the European Union [EU]). Transnational movements for environmental, labor, and human rights have had modest successes and, upon occasion, the international community responds generously to natural disasters (but more unevenly to massive violations of human rights, as in Rwanda, the former Zaire, or Darfur). The neo-Kantian position underestimates the difficulty of transforming a transnational “ought” into a regional, let alone international “is” of effective human, labor, and environmental rights. The road to greater international solidar

Historical Dictionary of Catholicism by William J. Collinge

698BOOK REVIEWS terms of material factors will be insufficient to explain civilization or humanity 's universal impulse toward the transcendent. As Fernando Cervantes points out, a secular view of history cannot comprehend the past as "an organic, intelligible whole" (p. 52). In contrast, Dawson saw history as the constant interpenetration of the eternal with the temporal that reveals an intelligible meaning. A Dawsonian history is open to theological norms and the revelation of the salvific plan,without, however, surrendering specifically historical norms or methods, a point made by Dermot Quinn in his essay (p. 74). Francesca Murphy critiques what she calls a "deep-sea diving" approach to the past, which seeks to recover the lost glories, political or theological, of Catholicism. While useful and important, such archaeological history in fact echoes secular histories that find the reasons for cultural change in political or material terms. "Even if the findings of the Catholic side are true, [such] history is Marxist 'Catholic studies,' not Catholic history" (p. 124). Rather, drawing on Dawson's use of "symbolic" moments (such as the conversion of barbarian kings to Christianity) to dramatize the moral order that those symbols embody, Murphy calls Catholic historians to conceptualize the normal events of the world as infused with the divine. Only then, she argues, can Catholicism present a universal history that supplies the "perceptual apparatus" (p. 130) lacking in its secular counterparts. Eternity in Time is an outstanding collection of essays that challenges secular standards ofvalue in historical study and presents an alternative vision based in Catholic thought. Gerald J. Russello New York Historical Dictionary of Catholicism. By William J. Collinge. [Historical Dictionaries of Religions, Philosophies, and Movements, No. 12.] (Lanham, Maryland:The Scarecrow Press. 1997. Pp. xx, 551. $58.00.) This is a historical dictionary of Catholicism, not "a dictionary of the history of Catholics,"the author tells us in the introduction. He has made an attempt,he says, to encompass all seven of Ninian Smart's dimensions of religion as they apply to Catholicism: practical-ritual, experiential-emotional, narrative-mythic, doctrinal-philosophical, ethical-legal, social-institutional,and material (artifacts). It is an extremely ambitious undertaking but one I believe he has accomplished in a brilliant way. In covering the whole history of the Church, he makes a judicious selection from the enormous mass of facts involved. All in all, a fine summary of the beliefs, rites, events, movements, memorable popes, saints, and other key persons in Catholic history. The summary of church history he provides in the introduction is a model of compression and delineates well the BOOK REVIEWS699 main lines ofdevelopment. An interesting entry is even devoted to the tasks facing it today. The author,who teaches theology and philosophy at Mount Saint Mary's College , Emmitsburg, Maryland, had college teachers, students, and librarians primarily in mind, but the book deserves a wide audience. It is not a dry collection of facts but a lively, well written work, quite honest about the problematic aspects of the Church's history. It should whet the reader's appetite for more information on the topics treated. As I say, he doesn't shy away from the thorny issues but walks bravely, albeit cautiously, over such minefields as the area of sexual morality. On such issues as homosexuality, birth control, and divorce he provides a balanced assessment of the state of the question. His entry on dissent in the Church is a masterpiece of compression. Here he notes how limited private disagreement had been allowed long before the SecondVatican Council by authorized theological textbooks and how this opinion was alluded to by the Theological Commission of the Council. In an interesting observation on the current scene he believes the radical opposition between the world and the Church so characteristic of pre-Vatican Council II days has resurfaced to some extent with Pope John Paul II. He provides a very full bibliography of some seventy-one pages. For anyone interested in the history of the Catholic Church, this is a most useful and up-todate reference work. It has already found a place on the bookshelves above my desk. Thomas Bokenkotter Xavier University Cincinnati, Ohio A History ofHeaven:The Singing Silence. ByJeffrey...

Eternity in Time: Christopher Dawson and the Catholic Idea of History ed. by Stratford Caldecott and John Morrill

BOOK REVIEWS General and Miscellaneous Eternity in Time: Christopher Dawson and the Catholic Idea of History. Edited by Stratford Caldecott and John Morrill. (Edinburgh: T & T Clark. 1997. Pp. 214. $39.95.) Christopher Dawson (1889-1970), although perhaps one of the century's more important historians, presents a seemingly contradictory legacy. His religious beliefs and innovative approach to historical study made him suspect in the eyes of the historical establishment of his day, while his ecumenism and reluctance to reify the Middle Ages reduced his influence among fellow Catholics, especially in his native England. Nonetheless, Dawson's work remains the most sophisticated attempt by a Christian historian to incorporate a providential vision into empirical analysis. His focus on "metahistory" as a means to discover the underlying purposes of history, has become even more crucial in our postmodern age, when the denial of true knowledge has become fashionable. And many of his methods—if not his conclusions—have been adopted by the contemporary historical profession. This collection of papers arose out of a conference held at Westminster College , Oxford, in honor of the silver jubilee of his death, and treats of two main subjects. The first is an examination of Dawson and his work. The second purpose is to extract from that examination an historical approach that is both truly Catholic and fully compatible with general standards of scholarly rigor. As the subtitle indicates, what the essays explore is a Catholic idea of history, not simply a "Catholic history," which, as Dawson himself noted, too often becomes merely a"department of apologetics." Rather,Eternity in Time seeks a new synthesis between the reality centered in the Incarnation and the truths of history. The contributors demonstrate Dawson's profound sensitivity both to the complexity of history and to his conviction of its underlying unity. Dawson's conclusion that religion is the key to history suffuses his work. "Every human culture must possess some spiritual dynamic,which provides the energy necessary for . . . civilization," he wrote in 1929, and his life was spent exploring the implications of that insight. His familiarity with the latest anthropological works and his immersion in the literature and beliefs of other cultures convinced him that historical approaches that attempt to explain religion in 697 698BOOK REVIEWS terms of material factors will be insufficient to explain civilization or humanity 's universal impulse toward the transcendent. As Fernando Cervantes points out, a secular view of history cannot comprehend the past as "an organic, intelligible whole" (p. 52). In contrast, Dawson saw history as the constant interpenetration of the eternal with the temporal that reveals an intelligible meaning. A Dawsonian history is open to theological norms and the revelation of the salvific plan,without, however, surrendering specifically historical norms or methods, a point made by Dermot Quinn in his essay (p. 74). Francesca Murphy critiques what she calls a "deep-sea diving" approach to the past, which seeks to recover the lost glories, political or theological, of Catholicism. While useful and important, such archaeological history in fact echoes secular histories that find the reasons for cultural change in political or material terms. "Even if the findings of the Catholic side are true, [such] history is Marxist 'Catholic studies,' not Catholic history" (p. 124). Rather, drawing on Dawson's use of "symbolic" moments (such as the conversion of barbarian kings to Christianity) to dramatize the moral order that those symbols embody, Murphy calls Catholic historians to conceptualize the normal events of the world as infused with the divine. Only then, she argues, can Catholicism present a universal history that supplies the "perceptual apparatus" (p. 130) lacking in its secular counterparts. Eternity in Time is an outstanding collection of essays that challenges secular standards ofvalue in historical study and presents an alternative vision based in Catholic thought. Gerald J. Russello New York Historical Dictionary of Catholicism. By William J. Collinge. [Historical Dictionaries of Religions, Philosophies, and Movements, No. 12.] (Lanham, Maryland:The Scarecrow Press. 1997. Pp. xx, 551. $58.00.) This is a historical dictionary of Catholicism, not "a dictionary of the history of Catholics,"the author tells us in the introduction. He has made an attempt,he says, to encompass all seven of Ninian...

The ground impulse generated by a plane fuel-air explosion with side relief

Detonations can be initiated in unconfined fuel-oxidizer clouds by blast waves of sufficient energy. The ground impulse generated by such detonations can cause considerable damage. An analytical theory is developed in the present paper, which makes it possible to predict this impulse, and experimental measurements which verify the theory are reported. A plane detonation wave propagating through a one-dimensional fuel-air cloud in contact with the ground and with the inert atmosphere at height h is considered. The wave is followed by an expansion wave which propagates from the inert gases into the combustion products, and an oblique shock is induced in the inert bounding the explosive. In computing the impulse only the region behind the detonation where the expansion is reflected from the ground is considered. The impulse per unit area is found to be the product of p 2( h C ) and a universal impulse function U s ( ξ), where p 2 is the pressure behind the detonation and C is the Chapman-Jouguet velocity, and ξ = x l is the dimensionless distance from the detonation. Experimental values of the pressure and impulse behind a plane wave were obtained using a plastic bag, 4 × 4 × 20 ft long, filled with a stoichiometric MAPP-air mixture. The detonation was initiated using an explosive initiator at one end of the bag. Pressure transducers placed on the ground plane along the center of the bags were used to determine the variation of the pressure and impulse per unit area with time. Theory and experiment were found to be in excellent agreement.