Garuda 5 (khyung lnga): Ecologies of Potency and the Poison-Medicine Spectrum of Sowa Rigpa’s Renowned ‘Black Aconite’ Formula

This article focuses on ethnographic work conducted at the Men-Tsee-Khang (Dharamsala, India) on Garuda 5 (khyung lnga), a commonly prescribed Tibetan medical formula. This medicine’s efficacy as a painkiller and activity against infection and inflammation is largely due to a particularly powerful plant, known as ‘virulent poison’ (btsan dug) as well as ‘the great medicine’ (sman chen), and identified as a subset of Aconitum species. Its effects, however, are potentially dangerous or even deadly. How can these poisonous plants be used in medicine and, conversely, when does a medicine become a poison? How can ostensibly the same substance be both harmful and helpful? The explanation requires a more nuanced picture than mere dose dependency. Attending to the broader ‘ecologies of potency’ in which these substances are locally enmeshed, in line with Sienna Craig’s Efficacy and the Social Ecologies of Tibetan Medicine (2012), provides fertile ground to better understand the effects of Garuda 5 and how potency is developed and directed in practice. I aim to unpack the spectrum between sman (medicine) and dug (poison) in Sowa Rigpa by elucidating some of the multiple dimensions which determine the activity of Garuda 5 as it is formulated and prescribed in India. I thus embrace the full spectrum of potency— the ‘good’ and the ‘bad,’ the ‘wanted’ and the ‘unwanted’—without presuming the universal validity of biomedical notions of toxicity and side effects

Integrating Naming and Addressing of Persistent data in Programming Language and Operating System Contexts

There exist a number of desirable transparencies in distributed computing, viz., name transparency: having a uniform way of naming entities in the system, regardless of their type or physical make up; location transparency: having a uniform way of addressing entities, regardless of their physical location; representation transparency: having a uniform way of representing data, which simplifies sharing data between applications written in different highlevel languages and running on different hardware architectures (interoperability) and finally invocation transparency: having a uniform way of invoking operations on entities. The advent of persistency in programming language contexts has created a need for the integration of these four important concepts, viz., naming, addressing, representation and manipulation of data in programming language and operating system contexts. This paper attempts to address the first three transparencies, postponing the fourth to a later paper. First, we make up a list of things that are needed to construct a persistent programming environment and relate this list to existing persistent object models, revealing their inadequacies. We then describe a new model which merges programming language and operating system naming contexts into a global name space which, while enforcing uniformity through the use of globally unique names, still allows the application of personal nicknames. Furthermore, we explain how persistent data is stored and retrieved using a client/server model of interaction, and how it could be acted upon correctly, through the concept of typed data. We conclude by checking how well our model scores on the wish list, listing the current status and future directions for research

Simulating Wde-area Replication

We describe our experiences with simulating replication algorithms for use in far flung distributed systems. The algorithms under scrutiny mimic epidemics. Epidemic algorithms seem to scale and adapt to change (such as varying replica sets) well. The loose consistency guarantees they make seem more useful in applications where availability strongly outweighs correctness; e.g., distributed name service

Introduction | Approaching Potent Substances in Medicine and Ritual across Asia

Introduction to themed research articles on Approaching Potent Substances in Medicine and Ritual across Asia

Landscape Design Dialogue. Bridging the gap between knowledge and action

Spatial planners and landscape architects do not excel in theory development. The authors, being a practicing landscape architect-planner and a planning scholar, explore new roads to a middle range theory of landscape design and planning. Building on theories-in-use in regional planning practice they develop an empirically grounded methodology for planning and design. The process of theory building is part of a process of methodical reflection on best and worst practices. It focuses on an analysis of planning and design efforts in the period 1970 – 2005 which have gradually transformed the landscape of the Rhine-Meuse Flood Plain in the Netherland

De negatieve teleologie van Hans Jonas : Een ethiek voor de technologische samenleving

Musschenga, A.W. [Promotor]Kirschenmann, P.P. [Copromotor

Wat is genoeg volgens Hans Jonas?

De auteur hoopt binnenkort te promoveren aan de Vrije Universiteit op een proefschrift over Hans Jonas. Het paper is niet alleen bedoeld om licht te werpen op bepaalde dilemma’s van de technologische samenleving, maar tevens om de actualiteit van het denken van de conservatieve ethicus Hans Jonas te laten zien en zijn werk opnieuw ter discussie te stellen.We kunnen vragen: “Wanneer is Schiphol groot genoeg geworden?” We kunnen ook vragen: “Wanneer hebben we genoeg rekening gehouden met het over geluidshinder klagende individu?” Het centrale morele dilemma van de technologische samenleving kan begrepen worden als een conflict tussen duurzaamheid en rechtvaardigheid. Aan de ene kant staat het vage, algemene belang van de samenleving bij stabiliteit en continuïteit, aan de andere kant de uiterst concrete, persoonlijke vraag van het individu naar gelijke kansen en rechtszekerheid. Kenmerkend voor de technologische samenleving is dat er geen natuurlijke omstandigheden meer zijn die het individu tot bescheidenheid manen. Daarom doet zich op de terreinen van gezondheid, veiligheid en sociale zekerheid een voortdurend conflict voor rond de vraag: “Wat is genoeg?” Met Hans Jonas wil ik betogen dat een liberale ethiek geen antwoord in huis heeft op deze vraag. Een liberale ethiek kan slechts grenzen stellen aan individuele belangen en de daaruit voortvloeiende technology push door haar beslissing te verdedigen als een keuze voor het minste van twee kwaden. Zij is niet in staat om het individu te verzoenen met het algemene belang van duurzaamheid, wat tot uitdrukking komt in een permanente onvrede onder de bevolking. Juist om de conservatieve vraag naar duurzaamheid weg te halen uit de exclusiviteit van de milieuethiek, bespreek ik de casus: “Wanneer heeft de politie genoeg moeite gedaan om een kindermoordenaar achter tralies te krijgen?

Wide-address spaces - exploring the design space

In a recent issue of Operating System Review, Hayter and McAuley [1991] argue that future high-performance systems trade a traditional, bus-based organization for one where all components are linked together by network switches (the Desk-Area Network). In this issue of Operating System Review, Leslie, McAuley and Mullender conclude that DAN-based architectures allow the exploitation of shared memory on a wider scale than just a single (multi)processor. In this paper, we will explore how emerging 64-bit processors can be used to implement shared address spaces spanning multiple machines