An exploration of the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson. A study of the spiritual provocations to be found in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson, High Weirdness charts the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality that arose from the American counterculture of the 1970s. These three authors changed the way millions of readers thought, dreamed, and experienced reality—but how did their writings reflect, as well as shape, the seismic cultural shifts taking place in America? In High Weirdness, Erik Davis—America's leading scholar of high strangeness—examines the published and unpublished writings of these vital, iconoclastic thinkers, as well as their own life-changing mystical experiences. Davis explores the complex lattice of the strange that flowed through America's West Coast at a time of radical technological, political, and social upheaval to present a new theory of the weird as a viable mode for a renewed engagement with reality.

Charles Fort was an American researcher from the early twentieth century who cataloged reports of unexplained phenomena he found in newspapers and science journals. A minor bestseller with a cult appeal, Fort's work was posthumously republished in the pulp science fiction magazine Astounding Stories in 1934. His idiosyncratic books fascinated, scared, and entertained readers, many of them authors and editors of science fiction. Fort's work prophesied the paranormal mainstays of SF literature to come: UFOs, poltergeists, strange disappearances, cryptids, ancient mysteries, unexplained natural phenomena, and everything in between. Science fiction authors latched on to Fort's topics and hypotheses as perfect fodder for SF stories. Writers like Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, H.P. Lovecraft, and others are examined in this exploration of Fortean science fiction--a genre that borrows from the reports and ideas of Fort and others who saw the possible science-fictional nature of our reality.

"From precognitive dreams and telepathic visions to near-death experiences, UFO encounters, and beyond, so-called impossible phenomena are not supposed to happen, but do happen all the time. These are the kinds of fantastic experiences that Jeffrey J. Kripal takes up in How to Think Impossibly. The impossible, Kripal asserts, is a function not of reality, but of our present social constructions and subsequent perceptions and cognitions. In other words, we think these events and experiences are impossible, but they are only impossible within our historically constructed frameworks. In How to Think Impossibly, Kripal thinks-with specific individuals and their extraordinary experiences in vulnerable, open, and often humorous ways. These lines of thought interweave the mental and material dimensions of humanistic and scientific inquiry, resulting in a developing awareness in the reader that what we think of as the impossible is not impossible at all"--

The European Conference on Information Retrieval Research, now in its 25th “Silver Jubilee” edition, was initiallyestablished bythe Information Retrieval Specialist Group of the British Computer Society(BCS-IRSG) under the name “Annual Colloquium on Information Retrieval Research,” and was always held in the United Kingdom until 1997. Since 1998 the location of the colloquium has alternated between the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe, in order to re?ect the growing European orientation of the event. For the same reason, in 2001 the event was renamed “European Annual Colloquium on Information Retrieval Research.” Since 2002, the proceedings of the Colloquium have been published bySpringer-Verlag in their Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. In 2003 BCS-IRSG decided to rename the event “European Conference on Information Retrieval Research,” in order to re?ect what the event had slowly turned into, i.e., a full-blown conference with a European program committee, strong peer reviewing, and a (mostly) European audience. However, ECIR still retains the strong student focus that has characterized the Colloquia since their inception: student fees are kept particularlylow, a s- dent travel grant program is available in order to encourage students to attend the conference (and encourage student authors to present their papers pers- ally), and a Best Student Paper Award is assigned (conversely, ECIR has no best paper award).

Annotation This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th Congress of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence, AI*IA 2007, held in Rome, Italy, in September 2007. The 42 revised full papers presented together with 14 revised poster papers and 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 80 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on knowledge representation and reasoning, multiagent systems, distributed AIai, knowledge engineering, ontologies and the semantic Web, machine learning, natural language processing, information retrieval and extraction, planning and scheduling, AI and applications. Three special tracks depicting progresses in significant application fields that represent increasingly relevant topics contain 18 additional papers on AI and robotics, AI and expressive media, and intelligent access to multimedia information.

Some people think that all schools are the same. They might have different uniforms, slogans and emblems but in the end, there isn’t much difference between them ... THESE PEOPLE ARE WRONG! They have not been to Wally Park PS. A normal day at Wally Park would be the weirdest day in any other school’s history. There's an annual Extreme Walkathon that is not for the faint-hearted, a talking Naughty Tree and an Out-of-Bounds Area you might truly never return from and the meanest (and most vain) principal in Australia. Keep everything crossed that your family is not moving to Wally Park anytime soon!