This is my favorite of the many books by this well respected yoga scholar. It's a series of original essays on many different facets of Yoga. Extremely informative and simply a joy to read. For example, anyone who has struggled to gain a perspective on the many Indians who have so influenced Yoga in the West will love Chapter 3, "East Meets West: A Historical Perspective." It places many famous yogis in context: Vivekananda, Ramakrishna, Theo Bernard's unknown teacher-Yogendra, Yogananada, Ramana Maharshi-the sage Paul Bruton made famous in the West, Krishnamacharya-the scholar,practitioner and healer who launched the modern revival of hatha yoga via his students, and many more. See Chapter 5, "Science Studies Yoga", for a review of early and modern efforts to measure what yogis are doing and quantify what the benefits of practice are. Chapters 12 and 13, "The History of Hatha Yoga" and "The Evolution of Posture",discuss the relatively short history of what many normally think of as Yoga today. There is even a delightful "interview" with Patanjali, where a modern scholar asks the sage many of the questions students throughout the ages have wondered about. This book is out of print, but well worth the effort to solicit via Amazon or, better yet, petition Georg for another printing.

Extremely well-written, organized, and informative. A rare, intelligent book on human sexuality and gender relations. A must-read for couples!

Best book I've seen on Simmel. Others have more interesting titles, but this book is better. Nice remarks about other theories of modernity. Clearly written. A fine introduction to Simmel.

This book is a bible for those who do astroparticlephysics. I warmly recommend to all PhD students as well as people writing reviews of subjects close to this area. Georg has done great work especially in marking down all references.

This is one of the gems of the 20th century ... small, compact and jammed with insight about what kind of courage it takes to be in front of the curve intellectually and ethically.
Axelrod looks at three giants in the development of pyschology with Freud, Simmer in the field of sociology and Buber in communications, educational philosophy and theology. His short, yet extremely elegant analysis of what consists a radical shift in the accepted notions of an intellectual field deserves being republished.
Buber, for example, is a tough read. Just try getting through his seminal work "I and Thou". This is one of the best explications of Buber I've ever read. Axelrod, with the intellectual distillaton of a Gabriel Marcel, takes apart ... the essence of Buber that many of Buber's critics have missed entirely.
Get a copy of this one before it is too late. And if you find anything else Charles David Axelrod has written, let me know.

Although Mr. Gemerchak's insight into Bataille's critical synthesis of Hegel is outstanding (the most lucid and edifying to date), his personal obsession with custard, women's shoes, and bats may be distracting (albeit entirely amusing) to the majority of readers. To the expert, however, Gemerchak's link between nocturnal, egg-based footwear and his subject serve as a reflexive articulation of desire, authenticity, subjectivity, and fetish, likening his work to those of Garcia-Marquez or St. Augustine. To be certain, this freshman endeavor places him well on the way to reaching (surpassing?) the recognition and significance of Lacan, Baudrilard, or even DiCaprio.

This reviewer's life of the mind and basting techiniques have been significantly altered by Mr. Gemerchak. One leaves his book with a strong desire to be hosed down by a fire extinguisher, blamed for unattributable sins, and left to rot in the trunk of a Buick. I highly recommend "The Sunday of the Negative" as well as his sophomore tome "Mr. Binky Gets a Bump" to anyone longing for a deeper understanding of metaphysics, self-awareness, or flan.

Teachings of Yoga always sells on our yoga center's bookstore. Often, people choose this book as a gift because of the short sayings translated by Dr. Feuerstein. The sayings are inspiring and easy reading. By reading these teachings, you will be lead further to study some of the great yoga practitioners.

If you are trying to do precision machining with machines tools that pre-date the NC / CNC era then this is a handy book to have around.

It is something of a history book. Before all of our machine tools were controlled by computers it was possible to turn out parts to extremely fine tolerances - you just had to know what you were doing. Not only do you have to be a skilled machinist, but you also need to know how to set-up your machine to produce these fine tolerances in the finished work.

This book is all about the set-up of machine tools using what (today) may seem like old-fashioned techniques. I have worked with many machinists that still use these techniques to great effect today - sadly it is becoming a lost art with today's push button operation.

Perhaps the biggest application for a book like this today is the amateur or hobbyist at home with basic equipment. These techniques will help you get the most out of whatever equipment you are using - there are sections on:

-Milling machines and gear cutting machines
-Centre Lathes, Turret Lathes, Multi-spindle automatics and Vertical boring mills
-Grinding Machines
-Shearing, Punching, Stamping machines and Presses
-Woodworking Machines (saws, lathes, planing and mortising machines)

The volume is fairly slim - only around 110 pages - but it contains all the information, procedures and descriptions of the equipment you'll need for testing.

I have the 8th edition - published by Pergamon Press - ISBN 0-08-021685-4

This is the first book that I am aware of that addresses the foundations of evolutionary and genetic algorithms, evolution strategies, and evolutionary programming from a rigorous mathematical point of view. The book is designed for an audience of mathematicians and computer scientists who are curious about evolutionary strategies and need a formal treatment of its foundations. Readers currently involved in designing and writing genetic programs will find this book helpful in the optimizing of their algorithms, even though at times they might find the presentation a little heavy-handed.

Evolutionary strategies are thought of as dynamical systems in the book, but these are not in general deterministic, but probabilistic in nature. The state space of the dynamical system consists of the direct product of an object parameter space, an endogenous strategy parameter set, and a collection of fitness functions. Evolution takes place in this state space via the "genetic operators", i.e. the selection, mutation, reproduction, and recombination operators. The goal of course is to find an optimum solution to the problem, and so a consideration of the convergence of the evolution strategy to this optimum must be addressed.

These issues and others, such as the differentiation between evolutionary strategies and ordinary Monte Carlo methods, are discussed in great detail in the book. The author emphasizes that the mechanism of evolutionary strategies lies in the local properties of state space, the evolutionary process being obtained by small steps in this space. He also suggests three prerequisites for the working of evolutionary algorithms, namely the evolutionary progress principle, the genetic repair hypothesis, and mutation-induced operation by recombination. The first is the statement that each change of the individuals in the state space can result in fitness gain as well as fitness loss. The second is a device employed for statistical estimation, and attempts to answer why recombinant evolution strategies are better than nonrecombinant strategies. The third is the statement that dominant recombination causes cohesion of a population and is represented by a local operator which transforms the mutations by a random sampling process.

The author makes use of differential geometry in the book to establish a theoretical framework to predict the local performance of evolution strategies. The hypersurface model is constructed as a fitness model for the calculation of progress measures, and for an elementary model of evolution dynamics. Tensor calculus is employed to study deformations of the sphere model, with the goal of obtaining useful formulae for the progress rate. A mean radius of this deformation is calculated, to serve as a substitute radius in the progress rate formulae for the sphere model.

For the case of (1+1)-selection, i.e. one parent and one offspring, where both parents and offspring are contained in the selection pool, the author derives exact integral representations for the progress rate. The quality gain for one parent and any member of offspring is also considered, and the author derives an integral expression for it using an approximation of the distribution function of the mutation-induced fitness distribution. He argues that the progress rate and the quality gain are progress measures that describe totally different aspects of the performance of evolution strategies.

The general problem of an evolution strategy with arbitrary numbers of parents and offspring is also considered. Since the distribution of parents in the parameter space is unknow, and since it changes in successive generations, this makes the analysis of the progress rate extremely difficult. The author does however derive the relations for this model in terms of a formal expression for the progress rate which is given as an integral over the distribution of a single descendant, which is generation-dependent and unknown. This distribution is approximated using Hermite polynomials and the determination of this function is then reduced to the finding of a collection of coefficients. These coefficients are functions of moments of the offspring and are estimated by the random selection process of the evolution strategy.

Recombinative evolution strategies are also studied by the author, and two special recombination types considered, namely the intermediate and dominant cases. Intermediate recombination is shown to lead to higher performance compared to nonrecombinativie strategies. The dominant case is shown to lead to mutation-induced speciation by recombination.

The author also analyzes the dynamic adaptation of the mutation strength to the local topology of the fitness landscape. Self-adaptation, which is the method for applying evolution to the adjustment of optimal strategy parameter values, is given detailed treatment for the case of one parent in terms of mean value dynamics.

This was the first full length book by Bruno Bauer translated into English. Dr. Stepelevich deserves credit for this fact alone. His translation is superb and invokes the feel of Bauer's troubled mind at the time of this writing. It is rarely recognized that young Bruno Bauer was one of Hegel's favorite pupils. Bauer was grooming himself to be the next great German philosopher after Hegel, and except for a twist of fate, he would have accomplished his goal because he was arguably the most intelligent man of his time. He was imitated by both Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche -- that should give the reader a hint of his intelligence.

The drama of Bruno Bauer began when David Strauss (a Schleiermachian) wrote the first de-mythologization of the Gospels in the mid-1830's and invoked Hegel's name. But the work was not a Hegelian work. More, David Strauss caused a scandal because his now-famous book took a non-fundamentalist attitude toward the Bible. The Government demanded that the official Hegel school respond to this scandal. Bruno Bauer was elected to provide the answer. It is true that Hegelians were not fundamentalists, either, but they had very spiritual ideas and their approach to the Bible was very, very different from that of David Strauss. Bauer's response, then, was honest and accurate, but it did not impress the new fundamentalist German regime. Most Hegelians lost their jobs, and Bruno Bauer was one of them.

This book was written in 1841 when Bauer had just been fired from his post for being a Hegelian. The irony is that Bauer remained a Hegelian but wrote this book against Hegelians as a mockery of the German Establishment. Bauer published this book under the pseudonym of a Lutheran Bishop. The book itself is an ironic comedy, a protest, and a howl of pain during the fall of this great intellect. Dr. Stepelevich's translation has opened the floodgates of new research into this gargantuan intellect. (Today, informal translations of Bauer's CHRIST AND THE CAESARS and CHRISTIANITY EXPOSED are being tossed off for the 'It Was Piso' conspiracy theorists.) When the new translations rise to the level of Lawrence Stepelevich, a whole new dimension of the past century of philosophy will be revealed.