The period from 1200 to 1600 was the golden age of fools. From representations of irreverent acts to full-blown insanity, fools appeared on the misericords of gothic churches and in the plots of Arthurian narratives, before achieving a wider prominence in literature and iconography in the decades around 1500. But how are we to read these figures appropriately? Is it possible to reconstruct the fascination that fools exerted on the medieval and early modern mind? While modern theories give us the analytical tools to explore this subject, we are faced with the paradox that by striving to understand fools and foolishness we no longer accept their ways but impose rational categories on them. Together these essays propose one way out of this dilemma. Instead of attempting to define the fool or trying to find the common denominator behind his many masks, this volume focuses on the qualities, acts, and gestures that signify foolishness. By investigating different manifestations of foolery rather than the figure of the fool himself, we can begin to understand the proliferation of fools and foolish behaviour in the texts and illustrations of manuscripts and early books.

The steady and unabated increase in the capacity of silicon has brought the semiconductor industry to a watershed challenge. Now a single chip can integrate a radio transceiver, a network interface, multimedia functions, all the "glue" needed to hold it together as well as a design that allows the hardware and software to be reconfigured for future applications. Such complex heterogeneous systems demand a different design methodology. A consortium of industrial and government labs have created a new language and a new design methodology to support this effort. Rosetta permits designers to specify requirements and constraints independent of their low level implementation and to integrate the designs of domains as distinct as digital and analog electronics, and the mechanical, optical, fluidic and thermal subsystems with which they interact.
In this book, Perry Alexander, one of the developers of Rosetta, provides a tutorial introduction to the language and the system-level design methodology it was designed to support.
* The first commercially published book on this system-level design language
* Teaches you all you need to know on how to specify, define, and generate models in Rosetta
* A presentation of complete case studies analyzing design trade-offs for power consumption, security requirements in a networking environment, and constraints for hardware/software co-design