Clouds Books

A non-profit institution that addresses the Public and private sectors around the world. It was established on May 14, 1948 as Project RAND. The articles of incorporation include the purpose of its creation:
To further and promote scientific, educational, and charitable purposes, all for the public welfare and security of the United States of America.


Paper may seem have been presented 30 years ago but very little changes to the concept has happened since. There are related papers as late as 1980 N-1479 Anomalous Snowfall Caused by Natural-Draft Cooling Towers.

This closest I can find to the title is his item that is still available.
Document No: P-5054 Year: 1973 Pages: 9

Cloud Dynamics and Modeling.

Author: Francis W. Murray

This was Prepared for presentation to the conference on modeling rainout/washout for military damage assessment analysis held by the Defense Nuclear Agency at Stanford Research Institute on July 24-25, 1973.
The RAND Cumulus Dynamics Model is discussed in the context of meteorological modeling in general. The model involves numerical solution of the hydrodynamic and thermodynamic equations pertinent to motions of the scale of a convective cloud together with solution of parameterized equations for the microphysical processes of condensation and evaporation.

Really exciting to read. Constant adventure! I am in love with the horses and unicorns in this book. They can talk! Alea is a great author and is only a teenager!

THIS IS A HIGHLY RECOMMENDED BOOK. I FIRST READ THIS AT AGE 10 AND IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN ONE OF MY FAVORITES. I REALLY LIKED THE MYSTICAL ELEMENTS OF THE STORY AND IT HELPED TO START MY INTEREST IN OTHER CULTURES.

In a recent review, Al Alvarez remarked that few poets today read Robert Southwell for pleasure. Although the subject of his review was Geoffrey Hill, it might well have been David Rigsbee, whose "Sonnets to Hamlet," the first of two sonnet sequences in his new Cloud Journal," begins with a quotation from Southwell's "The Burning Babe" (as well as one from Hamlet). Southwell's figure is a thread running through the sequence, which takes as its occasion a fire in a chicken processing plant in Hamlet, NC, in which 25 workers lost their lives due to the plant's policy of keeping all doors locket to prevent theft. The facts of the fire are in evidence of the poems, but Rigsbee doesn't dwell on them. Rigsbee is a Southerner, white and working class by birth, and one feels in these poems a human solidarity that refuses to reduce the dead to victims. Rather, he carries us quickly and surely from the glimpsed world into one that counts not only social justice but the possibilities for consolation in the face of tragic loss.

Rigsbee handles his material with what I would describe as a Southern Baroque sensibility. But the vision of the sonnets is not, finally, Christian, and John Coltrane, a native son of Hamlet, offers in his music more by way of consolation and meaning than does traditional faith. In this, Rigsbee follows one of his mentors, Richard Rorty.

The sonnets in the second sequence are equally rich and equally demanding. "Cloud Journal" is dedicated to the poet's mother, whose last days provide less the occasion than the spur for meditations on mortality and all of its time-frames. The elemental looms large in these poems, as does human frailty. These are poems that quietly begin from the great facts of time and change and engage them with the resources of poet and philosopher, reaching no great claims or solutions but a richness of affirmations of "certain / acuities" in the face of the otherness of the world.

Both series showcase Rigsbee's versatile and accomplished handlings of the verse form as well as his probing sympathy and intelligence, his pursuit in poems of what escapes our other ways with words. If we are beyond the point at which the sonnet can be put to radically novel uses, we are not beyond the point where such seamless handling of the form as Rigsbee's deserves our praises. These are wonderful poems, demanding, and rewarding the attention they ask.

This book is a quick read through some of the great Christian thinkers. Each chapter contains a concise history of each thinker with a helpful bibliography at the end. I found the chapters on Anselm, Zwingli, and Aquinas helpful in clarifying their significance in history, their relationship to modern theology, and their impact on their world. This is an excellent book for the layman, church library, or gift.

The Cloud Of Knowable Things is a collection of free-verse and varied-style poems by Elaine Equi that peer closely into everyday surroundings and unearth the overlooked enigma of the sublime workings of the cosmos. Minutia and grand unknowable designs combine in a cavalcade of lilting syllables. The Lost Poems: Your Average Dream/Fetish-Shroud/Victor Mature's Kiss/The Snow Queen's Summer House//In a Nutshell/De-composing/vintage Blouse/Politics and Vaseline//Mister Preface/Charm-Quake/Postponing the Future/Notice Each Part//The Cloud's Tantrum/Harlequin with a Gun

Written by an anonymous English monk during the late fourteenth century, The Cloud of Unknowing is a sublime expression of what separates God from humanity and is widely regarded as a hallmark of Western literature and spirituality. A work of simplicity, courage, and lucidity, it is a contemplative classic on the deep mysteries of faith. "Lift up your heart to God with a humble impulse of love and have himself as your aim, not any of his goods ... Set yourself to rest in this darkness, always crying out after him whom you love. For if you are to experience him or to see him at all, insofar as it is possible here, it must always be in this cloud and in this darkness."

This mystical work is a thought-provoking description of a contemplative discipline conveyed intimately from an unknown teacher to an unknown student. The text is a mystic exploration of the divine that rejects the use of the intellect and the imagination, preferring an inner knowing, like a numinous experience based on feeling, a gnosis of the heart. An important theme is the difference between the active and the contemplative personality; others include the awareness of self, death of the ego, and advice on leading the contemplative life. This writing is deeply embedded in Christian tradition and the author's gentleness and sense of humor are admirable. All spiritually-minded people will benefit from a study of this almost poetic text. The most beautiful sentiment is this: "For it is not what you are nor what you have been that God regards with his most merciful eyes, but what you would like to be."

The Sacred Names

The Cloud of Unknowing is Elizabeth Ruth Obbard's fourth book in the Classics for Everyone series, which preserves the style and content of classical spiritual writing while updating the original's diction and idiom. Obbard's treatment of the Cloud of Unknowing, whose author is unknown, grants access to spiritual riches that have often been considered beyond the average lay person. She introduces "Cloud" as one of four best known classics of English spirituality. All are from the fourteenth century, a time marked by widespread desire "to return to a life of simplicity, poverty, solitude, humility and a conscious imitation of the Savior." These same sentiments, Obbard points out, are resurfacing in the modern world.

The author of the Cloud writes for a young man embarking on the hermit's path, "but what he has to say can apply to all who feel called to a life of prayer." Obbard describes the book as balanced, precise, and practical. The premise is that God is a cloud, not knowable through the human intellect and reachable only through love, likened to an arrow aimed at the cloud. The analogy includes a cloud of forgetting between the individual and the cloud of unknowing. In this forgetting place we must tame our ego through meditation on the life of Christ, prayer, and works of mercy.

Against this mystical background, Obbard's work on the diction is especially engaging. Of the advice against judging others, she writes, "...look to your own behavior and leave others alone! Anything else is very dicey!" On God and sin: "Too much attention to minutiae takes your mind away from the work at hand, which is continual prayer....Want God. Avoid sin. Everything is summed up in these two words."

First of all, this is a beautifully illustrated book, a joy to read and browse. The pictures are from old books, the original black and white illustrations. The book is a collection of comments made by famous figures of the past on the subject of Christian faith. In this book, you can discover that many famous people of the past had vibrant, living Christian faith - and should be called 'born again Christians' using modern parlance. People you may not have suspected before of being a born again Christian: Ludwig Beethoven? How about Leonard Euler the great mathemtician? Or did you know that Napoleon Bonarparte was a firm believer in Jesus Christ, the Son of God? Or that Tolstoy had a born again experience as profound as Billy Graham???

This book is an eye opener !