Steps (novel)

Steps is a collection of short stories by a Polish-American writer Jerzy Kosinski, released in 1968 by Random House. The work comprises scores of loosely connected vignettes, which explore themes of social control and alienation by depicting scenes rich in erotic and violent motives. Steps won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction in 1969.

Overview

Steps was Kosinski's second novel, a follow-up to his successful The Painted Bird released in 1965. It consists of a series of short stories, reminiscences, anecdotes and dialogues, loosely linked to each other or having no connection at all, written in the first person. Samuel Coale described the narrator as "nothing more than a disembodied voice howling in some surrealistic wilderness." The book does not name any characters or places where described situations take place.

The book has been interpreted as being about "a Polish man's difficulties under the harsh Soviet regime at home played against his experiences as a new immigrant to the United States and its bizarre codes of capitalism." The stories reflect upon control, power, domination and alienation, depicting scenes full of brutality or sexually explicit. Steps contains remarkable autobiographical elements and numerous references to World War II.

18 Steps

18 Steps is an EP by Trey Anastasio that was included as a bonus with pre-orders of Bar 17 from his official website. The disc contains nine new songs, which are outtakes from Bar 17. Like the tracks on Bar 17, the tunes featured on 18 Steps were recorded over roughly a three-year period, from the spring of 2003 to the summer of 2006. 18 Steps can be found in select independent record stores, online auctions, and is still available for download via LivePhish.

Track listing

All songs written and composed by Trey Anastasio, except where noted. 

Twelve-step program

A twelve-step program is a set of guiding principles outlining a course of action for tackling problems including alcoholism, drug addiction and compulsion. Originally proposed by Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) as a method of recovery from alcoholism, the original Twelve Steps were first published in the 1939 book Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How More Than One Hundred Men Have Recovered from Alcoholism. The method was adapted and became the foundation of other twelve-step programs.

As summarized by the American Psychological Association, the initial steps were six as follows:

Overview

Twelve-step methods have been adapted to address a wide range of alcoholism, substance-abuse and dependency problems. Over 200 self-help organizations—often known as fellowships—with a worldwide membership of millions—now employ twelve-step principles for recovery. Narcotics Anonymous was formed by addicts who did not relate to the specifics of alcohol dependency.

Order and disorder (physics)

In physics, the terms order and disorder designate the presence or absence of some symmetry or correlation in a many-particle system.

In condensed matter physics, systems typically are ordered at low temperatures; upon heating, they undergo one or several phase transitions into less ordered states. Examples for such an order-disorder transition are:

The degree of freedom that is ordered or disordered can be translational (crystalline ordering), rotational (ferroelectric ordering), or a spin state (magnetic ordering).

The order can consist either in a full crystalline space group symmetry, or in a correlation. Depending on how the correlations decay with distance, one speaks of long-range order or short-range order.

If a disordered state is not in thermodynamic equilibrium, one speaks of quenched disorder. For instance, a glass is obtained by quenching (supercooling) a liquid. By extension, other quenched states are called spin glass, orientational glass. In some contexts, the opposite of quenched disorder is annealed disorder.

Fictional universe of The Guardians of Time

In the fictional Guardians of Time Trilogy, author Marianne Curley constructs a highly detailed alternate universe in which much of the action of the series takes place, unknown to the regular world. In this universe, two organizations battle for control over time.

The Guard

The Guardians of Time (known also as The Guard) is a society dedicated to preserving history against the attempts of the Order of Chaos to alter it. It is headed by a sexless immortal called Lorian, who is backed by a Tribunal of nine members, each a representative of a house.

The headquarters of the Tribunal, as well as the Guard itself, is located in Athens, year 200 BC, outside of the mortal measurements of time. For their purposes, they also use a place called the Citadel, connected to another area known as the labyrinth (also used by Order of Chaos) which serves as a disembarkation point for the Guards' missions into the past. Guard meetings frequently take place in Arkarian's, a Guard member's, abode hidden within the depths of a mountain. Connected to this mountain is the hidden city of Veridian and later learned, also connected to Neriah's fortress.

Order (biology)

In biological classification, the order (Latin: ordo) is

What does and does not belong to each order is determined by a taxonomist. Similarly for the question if a particular order should be recognized at all. Often there is no exact agreement, with different taxonomists each taking a different position. There are no hard rules that a taxonomist needs to follow in describing or recognizing an order. Some taxa are accepted almost universally, while others are recognised only rarely.

For some groups of organisms, consistent suffixes are used to denote that the rank is an order. The Latin suffix -(i)formes meaning "having the form of" is used for the scientific name of orders of birds and fishes, but not for those of mammals and invertebrates. The suffix -ales is for the name of orders of vascular plants.