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The dominant psychiatric traditions have failed to clearly comprehend that ‘sadness’ is a basic facet of the human predicament and not a clinical disorder. It is true that grief and mourning are often grave departures from routine life, but it is not a morbid condition and there is no need to hand over the mourner for medical treatment. In grief counseling some of the richer facets of grief are seen: grief being a time for deep reflection on issues of the meaning of life and for commemorating the contributions of the lost one and make one’s love alive. Moving out of the conceptual and scientific issues concerning ‘depression’ and ‘sadness’, this study moves into the practical concerns of managing sadness and grief. The author’s own contributions to grief management using Buddhist resources and the mindfulness-based emotion focused therapy are presented in detail. The study also refers to the current revolution in emotions studies and presents a close look at the emotion profile of ‘sadness’.

The paper considers various ruminations on the aftermath of the death of a close or loved one, and the processes of grieving and mourning. The conceptual examination of how grief impacts on its sufferers, from different cultural perspectives, is followed by an analytical survey of current thinking among psychologists, psychoanalysts and philosophers on the enigma of grief, and on the associated process of mourning. Robert C. Solomon reflected deeply on the ‘extreme emotion’ of grief in his extensive theorizing on the emotions, particularly in his essay ‘On Grief and Gratitude’, commenting that grief is ‘often described as a very private, personal emotion, characterized by social withdrawal and shutting oneself off from the world’ (Solomon RC, On grief and gratitude. In: In defense of sentimentality. Oxford University Press, New York, 2004: 73). While dialoguing with the spirit of Solomon by way also of a tribute to his immense insights, the paper engages in critical reflections on recent thinking in this area elsewhere—notably, in Heidegger, Freud, Nussbaum, Casey, Gustafson, and Kristeva—and offers a refreshing critique toward an alternative to the received wisdom.

Since rotating horizontal cylinders are often used as mixers, observations of axial segregation seem counterintuitive. Previous studies have shown axial segregation takes place in a partially filled cylinder, typically at 50% solid volume fraction. The dynamic angle of repose was interpreted as a control parameter of the two competing effects of diffusion and preferential drift. In this paper, we report a surprising result based on a set of experiments where the cylinder was almost completely packed by the mixed particles. Even in this extreme situation where a flowing surface layer was virtually nonexistent, mixed particles formed axially segregated bands as well as radial core of small particles. A visual observation on particle motion shows a series of collapses of local structures (micro-collapses) and this may be a driving force for the particle migration.

In answer to the question why is fluid dynamics more developed as a science than granular dynamics, one may cite that the Navier-Stokes equations of fluid motion are more developed and more extensively tested. A collection of grains—moving or static—inherently involves the intermediate or mesoscopic scales of motion: the strong separation of scales from the molecular to the macroscopic flow (Batchelor, 1967) that permits the continuum equations to well embody the physics of flowing fluids does not exist with granular materials, even for the smallest sized grains. Though this is undoubtedly true and represents a substantial theoretical challenge, perhaps in answering our question, we should not discount the ability of the aesthetic qualities of the flows themselves to motivate investigations. Fluid flows are beautiful. Typically opaque grains, on the other hand, mask what motivational beauty might lie in granular flow patterns. In this paper I describe some recent experiments visualising the granular transport in tumbling containers. In §2 I describe quasi-2-dimensional experiments in a rotating disk where the patterns can be observed by eye. These are experiments with the desirable qualities that the mixing behaviour can be explicitly viewed, quantified, and substantially modelled. In §3 I describe experiments in the 3-dimensional extension of the disk—a rotating tube. The 3-d flow is visualised with a non-invasive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique which gives direct information on the radial and axial flow patterns. Non-invasive imaging (Nakagawa et al., 1993; Broadbelt et al., 1993; Nikitidis et al., 1994; Jaeger et al., 1996) seems on the verge of providing a wealth of new experimental information on 3-d granular flows.

‘Herbs and spices’ describes those plant parts which are especially valued because of their taste, their aroma, their medicinal or preservative action and/or colour.

Dark starvation of intact plants and detached leaves is a well-known means of inducing senescence (1,11), which is characterized by loss of total protein and with some exceptions by the degradation of chlorophyll. The initial loss of soluble protein was shown to be due to the loss of RuBPCase (8,15) whereby a high selectivity of protease towards RuBPCase has been found (2,3). However, little is known about changes in RuBPCase synthesis during induced senescence (10), in contrast to the fact that its regulation during early phase of greening has been well investigated (5,7,12).

The following essay, which is divided into three parts, is a phenomenological interpretation of the two accounts of creation which open the Book of Genesis. In the first part below, I discuss the problem of interpretation stemming from the current use of the term “myths” for the creation accounts. In the second part, I examine a problem peculiar to modernity — critical consciousness along with the demystification and demythologization which may block us from interpreting symbolic discourse. These two parts then provide a dialectical framework for the third — the phenomenological approach to the texts about the “Beginning” in the Book of Genesis.