Michael Hoffman

The Arimasen Dialogues follows (but is independent of) Arimasen, the first in a series of novels of the planet Arimasen (if planet it is; some scholars and journalists, notably B. Sempleton and his scholarly source Dr. Eric Samsa, deny it), whose unique feature is, though quite like Earth in other respects, to be beyond Space, Time and Matter. Another casualty of the Singularity that occurred on (by one of several Earthly calendars then in use) July 20, 1969, was Coherence. There is none. Nor, assert some Arimasen philosophers (again, the matter is disputed, often heatedly) need there be. Coherence held us back, they say. Freed of its straitjacket, we attain our full human potential. We attain Chaos, counter the extremists among opposition. So be it, declares Reuben Ash, whose disciple Neil Grass, the talk show host and much else besides, is proud to declare himself. Let the action unfold. What action? Elections for kingship of the oasis of Kadesh Barnea. The Kadesh Barnea Rock Festival. The Statesmen, rock band of rock bands, reuniting to headline the Festival with a first performance of their Arimasen Opera.

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile cloth and stamped with foil.One morning, ordinary salesman Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself transformed into a giant cockroach. Metamorphosis, Kafka's masterpiece of unease and black humour, is one of the twentieth century's most influential works of fiction, and is accompanied here by two more classic stories.'He is the greatest German writer of our time. Such poets as Rilke or such novelists as Thomas Mann are dwarfs or plaster saints in comparison to him' - Vladimir Nabokov

Why does religion sometimes increase support for democracy and sometimes do just the opposite? In Faith in Numbers, political scientist Michael Hoffman presents a theory of religion, group interest, and democracy. Focusing on communal religion, he demonstrates that the effect of communal prayer on support for democracy depends on the interests of the religious group in question. For members of groups who would benefit from democracy, communal prayer increases support for democratic institutions; for citizens whose groups would lose privileges in the event of democratic reforms, the opposite effect is present. Using a variety of data sources, Hoffman illustrates these claims in multiple contexts. He places particular emphasis on his study of Lebanon and Iraq, two countries in which sectarian divisions have played a major role in political development, by utilizing both existing and original surveys. By examining religious and political preferences among both Muslims and non-Muslims in several religiously diverse settings, Faith in Numbers shows that theological explanations of religion and democracy are inadequate. Rather, it demonstrates that religious identities and sectarian interests play a major part in determining regime preferences and illustrates how Islam in particular can be mobilized for both pro- and anti-democratic purposes. It finds that Muslim religious practice is not necessarily anti-democratic; in fact, in a number of settings, practicing Muslims are considerably more supportive of democracy than their secular counterparts. Theological differences alone do not determine whether members of religious groups tend to support or oppose democracy; rather, their participation in communal worship motivates them to view democracy through a sectarian lens.

The stories collected here were written over the past seven years for a monthly Japan Times column called The Living Past. They range from earliest prehistory to modern times. The column still runs. The living past is inexhaustible. It never runs out of stories to tell. Column and book both were born of the conviction that the past, as the inrushing future engulfs it, is worth preserving - not only preserving but participating in, living in. Each story invites the reader to think, as the author did in writing it, "What would I have been if I'd lived then? What would I be doing, what thinking?" Try it. It's a wonderful form of self-discovery.

Michael Hoffman started writing poetry when he was forty-five. He kept his mind busy while in prison for the six years that he was there. He turned his life over to God, and he started writing poetry in many different themes, writing for his children to their mother during a fall on relationship. He was the one who had to change his life around. No one else could force him to change, but it had to be him who had to do it. He kept thinking and praying and doing it to be able to go home. He now lives in upstate New York. Some of the proceeds from this book is being donated to charities of choice in remembrance of his loved ones who passed away.

Brave Tsavo, the first Rhodesian Ridgeback hound, never really dies. The African nature god Shango blesses him with multiple lives, and he travels through time and space as a boon to the people he loves. Follow his heroic journey from battles with ferocious lions on the Dark Continent to his 9/11 disaster site search and rescue miracles. Watch him soften the hearts of weary soldiers at the Battle of Gettysburg and open the doors of perception for patients in the office of a famous Beverly Hiils psychiatrist.Colorful African mythology and the literary freedom of magical realism have inspired Hounds of Mercy. Dog owners know that communication with their companion animals is no fantasy. When you finish reading "The Psychiatrist's Hound," take your own beloved canine for a walk and just ask, "What do you think happens in the story about Lockdown, the prison hound?"

Travel companions on my journeys are four in number: Odysseus, Don Quixote, Huckleberry Finn and Basho." (Travel) "He walked in priestly garb. Arriving towards evening at a town or village, he'd chant sutras until passersby gave him, or flung him, enough money for a flophouse bed, a little food, a bath and enough sak to induce a measure of forgetfulness. 'A beggar, ' he admonished himself, 'has to learn to be an all-out beggar. Unless he can be that, he will never taste the happiness of being a beggar.'" (Walking) '"The pleasantest of all diversions, ' said the fourteenth-century Japanese priest Kenko," is to sit alone under the lamp, a book spread before you, and to make friends with people of a distant past you have never known.' Reading is inseparable from reverie. 'Sitting alone under the lamp, ' I was soon not alone at all, but hosting, I venture to say, as vivid and varied a company as ever gathered under one roof. (Genji, Myshkin and Jones) "Everest is nothing, mere seismology." (Fuji, Sinai, Olympos)

Robert Frost and Edward Thomas met in a bookshop in London in 1913. During the next four years, the two writers--Frost, an unknown poet who had sold his farm in New Hampshire in order to take his family to England for one last gamble on poetry and Thomas, a sad literary journalist--formed the most important friendship between poets since that of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Their friendship only ended with Thomas' death in Arras, France, a casualty of the First World War. The story of Edward Thomas' turn to poetry, in fact, has been dominated by the account of Robert Frost's injunction: to break his existing prose into lines, bringing his musical cadence and his direct speaking voice into conversation with formal prosody. Thomas himself had already championed Frost's own early work: "These poems are revolutionary because they lack the exaggeration of rhetoric.... Their language is free from the poetical words and forms that are the chief material of the secondary poets. The metre avoids not only old fashioned pomp and sweetness, but the later fashion also of discord and fuss. In fact the medium is common speech.... Mr. Frost has, in fact, gone back, as Whitman and as Wordsworth went back, through the paraphernalia of poetry into poetry once again." This book presents for the first time the full record, arranged chronologically, of what the poets wrote to, for, and about one another--their letters, poems, and Thomas' review of Frost's first two books. They reveal a warmth and charm that give us the key to the relationship between Frost and Thomas.

Based on the encoding process, arithmetic codes can be viewed as tree codes and current proposals for decoding arithmetic codes with forbidden symbols belong to sequential decoding algorithms and their variants. In this monograph, we propose a new way of looking at arithmetic codes with forbidden symbols. If a limit is imposed on the maximum value of a key parameter in the encoder, this modified arithmetic encoder can also be modeled as a finite state machine and the code generated can be treated as a variable-length trellis code. The number of states used can be reduced and techniques used for decoding convolutional codes, such as the list Viterbi decoding algorithm, can be applied directly on the trellis. The finite state machine interpretation can be easily migrated to Markov source case. We can encode Markov sources without considering the conditional probabilities, while using the list Viterbi decoding algorithm which utilizes the conditional probabilities. We can also use context-based arithmetic coding to exploit the conditional probabilities of the Markov source and apply a finite state machine interpretation to this problem. The finite state machine interpretation also allows us to more systematically understand arithmetic codes with forbidden symbols. It allows us to find the partial distance spectrum of arithmetic codes with forbidden symbols. We also propose arithmetic codes with memories which use high memory but low implementation precision arithmetic codes. The low implementation precision results in a state machine with less complexity. The introduced input memories allow us to switch the probability functions used for arithmetic coding. Combining these two methods give us a huge parameter space of the arithmetic codes with forbidden symbols. Hence we can choose codes with better distance properties while maintaining the encoding efficiency and decoding complexity. A construction and search method is proposed and simulation results show that we can achieve a similar performance as turbo codes when we apply this approach to rate 2/3 arithmetic codes. Table of Contents: Introduction / Arithmetic Codes / Arithmetic Codes with Forbidden Symbols / Distance Property and Code Construction / Conclusion

Green will illustrate and shed new light on the gamut of issues associated with renewable energy, a topic whose importance increases exponentially with every temperature record-setting year. Jane and Michael Hoffman use their years of experience to explain the technological and economic future of this ecologically significant issue. They incisively explain its politics: what countries are doing right now and, most importantly, what we should be doing. Green will cut through the hype and polemics surrounding ecologically friendly technologies and present the unvarnished truth. It will guide the reader through the misinformation and confusion over global warming, and demonstrate the degree to which renewable energy can be part of the solution.

For decades, Conservation International has devoted itself not only to saving endangered regions on the planet but also to chronicling, in lavish volumes, the biodiversity of these areas. These volumes, according to Choice, are "a superbly produced...source of hard-to-find information on biodiversity, biogeography, and conservation." "Hotspots Revisited" continues this rich tradition, drawing on the organization's continuing work to identify, research, and document biologically diverse yet dangerously threatened regions. The first "Hotspots" volume identified twenty-five endangered regions; "Hotspots Revisited" reveals nine additional areas, from Melanesia to northern Mexico, that now meet the same criteria. "Hotspots Revisited" presents the most up-to-date analyses of the ecology of these endangered areas - including new information on freshwater fish and other animal populations. But the heart of the volume is the hundreds of vibrant color photographs of the animals and plants under threat. Magnificent in conception and flawless in execution, "Hotspots Revisited" will be equally at home on a scientist's shelf or an ecotourist's coffee table.

Michael Hoffman's characters are, willy-nilly, participants in plots that don't add up. Some emerge stronger; others, shadows of their former selves. The six stories and one novel that make up this collection are set, wholly or primarily, in Japan, land of the artful mask. Meet the man who loses his key and sets in motion a chain of events whose incomprehensibility he will never understand; a small girl who accosts a fugitive murderer (is he really a murderer?) for sex, only to be admonished to go back to school; a murdered boy who is resurrected (is he really?) and wreaks his mad revenge; and, finally, Sidney Levin, whose reunion twenty years later with a lost Japanese girlfriend ends in a hopeless entanglement with her growing daughter.