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JUD.US By Michael N. Raskin, Ph.D. Jud was a country boy, the son of a potato farmer, Who, after graduating high school in 1963, sought The excitement of an enlistment in the Marines, well before serious hostilities had broken out in Southeast Asia. Fate was both good and bad to Jud Userle; it kept him out of harms way, but, in doing so, he had to face himself, and find strengths he would have never found otherwise. What he discovered was that, in captivity, he found his greatest identity and freedom; and, in his eventual freedom, he found only oppression. Ignorance is a cruel demon, especially when it is practiced by those who are in authority, and supposedly the keepers of the common good. The road to the madhouse can be paved by the best intentions of those who control society. This path is paved with the narcissism of its leaders, who can see only that which they believe to be true, whatever the actual facts may be. Jud Userle is cast into confusion of a world which can offer the sweetest interpersonal rewards, but also a world which can cause you to pay the price of ones humanity. This story of a war from which Jud suffered, but in which he never actively participated.

The human world is different from other natural phenomena after all, although the difference is not in any way beyond the reach of rationality. Human behaviors are responses to information, but unlike physical forces information does not force things. Input-output connections, made in the mind, are as diverse and changeable as the minds that contain them. On one hand this produces uncertainty-with one input leading to many outputs. But on the other hand this allows us to efficiently utilize disjunctive mechanisms-with many inputs leading to one output-and produce reliable outcomes in spite of uncertainty. These disjunctive mechanisms, in various guises, are most everywhere.There is, however, a mismatch between the logic of disjunctive mechanisms (A or B or C...leads to D), and the conjunctive logic (A and B and C...leads to D) of the understandings we generally rely upon. And there is a corresponding mismatch with rational and scientific ideals, traditions that have thrived using conjunctive reasoning and prize explaining the most with the least. We strive to explain mechanisms that are by nature prolific and diverse in parsimonious and unified terms. The idea is not that conventional explanations always come to the wrong conclusion. They can be right for the wrong reasons. Correlations between commonalities in a disjunction's inputs and its outputs can mimic the uniformities conjunctive explanations require. But even when these conclusions are useful, right for the wrong reasons explanations are always less informative than they seem, and can be treacherously misleading.The book explores misunderstandings and errors arising from these mismatches, and what can be done to correct them: in general understandings and reasoning, decision making and planning, research methods, and quantitative analysis. A practical problem is that we cannot readily replace conjunctive understandings with disjunctive ones. Our minds are not built to handle the myriad possibilities, probability estimates, calculations, and data handling required by disjunctive explanations. In the section on qualitative solutions the book discusses strategies that work within our limitations. This is not just a matter of separating out the useful from the misleading: a matter of applied reasoning and sound heuristics. Different information is sought, and different expectations, skills, and institutions are required to gather and make the best use of it. When the data collection and computational resources are available disjunctive systems can be tackled head-on. The section on quantitative solutions present a statistical approach, called Disjunctive Mapping, whose analyses are based on computing the sums of the probabilities of the various ways outcomes occur, and measuring the influence of individual factors in the contexts of each of those ways.

When the long term Mayor of a small city collapses, a political struggle begins.

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Warm Ocean Island is a illustrated novel set on a tropical island, inspired by the woodcut novels of the 1920's and 30's. These beautiful books not only told a story, they were works of sustained visual art. But the wordless stories in woodcut novels were necessarily simple, making up for the lack of words with the power of their images. The story in Warm Ocean Island needs words to be told-so the illustrations punctuate, emphasize, comment, and decorate instead of carrying the full weight of the narrative.

The longtime Mayor of a small and prosperous city collapses near the election, the Deputy Mayor and his daughter struggle to protect the city. We come to understand the Mayor through a game he played on long drives, inventing action and mystery movies based on what he drives by.

This story began with a bad dream. Not quite a nightmare, but haunting enough to make returning to sleep impossible. So I drew it. Soon other images came to mind and I drew them too. It all flowed with dream logic.

In this 1999 book, Michael Wheeler challenges critical orthodoxy by arguing that John Ruskin's writing is underpinned by a sustained trust in divine wisdom: a trust nurtured by his imaginative engagement with King Solomon and the temple in Jerusalem, and with the wisdom literature of the Old Testament. In Modern Painters, The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice, belief in the wisdom of God the Father informed Ruskin's Evangelical natural theology and his celebration of Turner's landscape painting, while the wisdom of God the Son lay at the heart of his Christian aesthetics. Whereas 'the author of Modern Painters' sought to teach his readers how to see architecture, paintings and landscapes, the 'Victorian Solomon' whose religious life was troubled, and who created various forms of modern wisdom literature in works such as Unto this Last, The Queen of the Air and Fors Clavigera, wished to teach them how to live.