Human Spaceflight Operations


Book Description

The purpose of this book is to share collective experience on human spaceflight operations. For the many authors, this is nothing less than a work of passion. They are sharing their life's work with the goal of passing on their experience to the next generation of space engineers, designers, operators, and crew.










Yvain


Book Description

The twelfth-century French poet Chrétien de Troyes is a major figure in European literature. His courtly romances fathered the Arthurian tradition and influenced countless other poets in England as well as on the continent. Yet because of the difficulty of capturing his swift-moving style in translation, English-speaking audiences are largely unfamiliar with the pleasures of reading his poems. Now, for the first time, an experienced translator of medieval verse who is himself a poet provides a translation of Chrétien’s major poem, Yvain, in verse that fully and satisfyingly captures the movement, the sense, and the spirit of the Old French original. Yvain is a courtly romance with a moral tenor; it is ironic and sometimes bawdy; the poetry is crisp and vivid. In addition, the psychological and the socio-historical perceptions of the poem are of profound literary and historical importance, for it evokes the emotions and the values of a flourishing, vibrant medieval past.







Recent Advances in Computational and Experimental Mechanics, Vol II


Book Description

This book (Vol. II) presents select proceedings of the first Online International Conference on Recent Advances in Computational and Experimental Mechanics (ICRACEM 2020) and focuses on theoretical, computational and experimental aspects of solid and fluid mechanics. Various topics covered are computational modelling of extreme events; mechanical modelling of robots; mechanics and design of cellular materials; mechanics of soft materials; mechanics of thin-film and multi-layer structures; meshfree and particle based formulations in continuum mechanics; multi-scale computations in solid mechanics, and materials; multiscale mechanics of brittle and ductile materials; topology and shape optimization techniques; acoustics including aero-acoustics and wave propagation; aerodynamics; dynamics and control in micro/nano engineering; dynamic instability and buckling; flow-induced noise and vibration; inverse problems in mechanics and system identification; measurement and analysis techniques in nonlinear dynamic systems; multibody dynamical systems and applications; nonlinear dynamics and control; stochastic mechanics; structural dynamics and earthquake engineering; structural health monitoring and damage assessment; turbomachinery noise; vibrations of continuous systems, characterization of advanced materials; damage identification and non-destructive evaluation; experimental fire mechanics and damage; experimental fluid mechanics; experimental solid mechanics; measurement in extreme environments; modal testing and dynamics; experimental hydraulics; mechanism of scour under steady and unsteady flows; vibration measurement and control; bio-inspired materials; constitutive modelling of materials; fracture mechanics; mechanics of adhesion, tribology and wear; mechanics of composite materials; mechanics of multifunctional materials; multiscale modelling of materials; phase transformations in materials; plasticity and creep in materials; fluid mechanics, computational fluid dynamics; fluid-structure interaction; free surface, moving boundary and pipe flow; hydrodynamics; multiphase flows; propulsion; internal flow physics; turbulence modelling; wave mechanics; flow through porous media; shock-boundary layer interactions; sediment transport; wave-structure interaction; reduced-order models; turbo-machinery; experimental hydraulics; mechanism of scour under steady and unsteady flows; applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence in mechanics; transport phenomena and soft computing tools in fluid mechanics. The contents of these two volumes (Volumes I and II) discusses various attributes of modern-age mechanics in various disciplines, such as aerospace, civil, mechanical, ocean engineering and naval architecture. The book will be a valuable reference for beginners, researchers, and professionals interested in solid and fluid mechanics and allied fields.




Men and Bears


Book Description

The time of Carnival represents a "wild" time at the end of winter and pointing to the beginning of a new season. It is characterized by the irruption of border figures, animal masks, characters which recall the world of the dead and which bring within themselves the germ of a vital force, of the energy that produces the reawakening of nature and announces the growth and fertility of the new crops. This wild domain shows itself under the shapes of a contiguity between human and animal: the costumes, the masks, refer to a world in which the characteristics of the human and those of the animal are fused and intertwined. Among these figures, in particular, emerge those of the Wild Man, the human being who takes on animal-like attributes and aspects, and of the Bear, the animal that, more than all the others, gets as close as possible to the human and seems to reflect a deformed image of it. Such symbolic images come from far off times and places to tell a story that belongs to our common origins. The bear assumes attributes and functions alike in very different cultural contexts, such as the Sámi of Finland or North-American hunter-gatherers, and represents a boundary between the world of nature and the human world, between the domain of animals and the difficult construction of humanity: a process continued for centuries, perhaps millennia, and which cannot still be said complete.




A Lonely Road


Book Description

Nowadays solitude is everywhere. Increasingly similar to monads, we are losing the ability to build solid connections between us, and to convert our private experience into public matter. What is becoming lost is an «art of translation», the capacity to build bridges between private problems and troubles and common causes, something that may connect people and make them act in accord: that is, politics as an art to «bring us together».The goal of this book is to question, in many different ways, the link between solitude and politics. It is the result of a collective work of young researchers, trying to understand, and to fight, their own solitude and loneliness within the academia. It offers a preliminary interdisciplinary discussion aiming to forge the tools to grasp this strange oxymoron, to better comprehend this simultaneously individual and collective condition.