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Diverse phenomena in sociocultural life are analyzed with recourse to Peirce's concept of the dicent interpretant. Attention to the semiotic role of the interpretant, itself a sign that articulates with connected signs in the generative process of semiosis, contributes to expanded understanding of ritual and attendant anthropological objects. I discuss how semiotic ideology makes possible, and makes real, a particular transformation of potentials of form expressed as likenesses into actual existents represented as contiguities. I develop an indexical treatment of such transformations that I label dicentization. Indexicality and iconicity have become central to linguistic anthropology and dicentization offers an account of how they work together beyond language in cultural semiosis. The article generalizes and applies the resulting explanatory model to a range of social phenomena described in the literature, including Aboriginal Australian iconography, Medieval Japanese asceticism, Homeric and Freudian psychologies of rage, and traps and primitivism in African and modern art. The analysis contributes to a semiotic realist conception of the continuity of representation and reality. [dicent, interpretant, ritual, indexicality, semiotic realism]Our ability to perceive reality means that reality realizes (actualizes) itself in us; that this in turn is the only way that we can realize (appropriate through understanding) the fact that reality is so realizing itself in us; and that in so doing the self-realization of reality itself takes place. Keiji Nishitani "Religion and Nothingness" (1982:5) The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. The very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of an infinite increase in knowledge.

The lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) was used to conduct a direct numerical simulation study of the airflow inside an idealised human upper airway. Results from both a modest resolution (18 million control volumes, 320 Gb data set) and an extreme resolution (148 million control volumes, 800 Gb data set) LBM simulation were compared to those from experimental results (Johnstone, A.: Hot wire measurements in an oropharyngeal pathway. M.Sc. Thesis, Queen's University, Kingston, ON, Canada, 2002; Johnstone et al., Expt Fluids 37(5): 673-689, 2004). A coarse resolution simulation (2.4 million control volumes, 105 Gb data set) was used to record the entire time-varying flow field; the nature of the mean structures in the three-dimensional flow field was studied using this data set. For the mean statistics, the LBM calculations yield better results than do the Reynolds averaged NavierStokes methods (Ball et al., Comput Fluids, 2007); the LBM reproduces significant detail of experimentally observed flow features. The flow is three-dimensional, obviously, and the interrogation of the mean flow structure is found to be unsteady so that sagittal plane and time-integrated measurements alone are insufficient to verify the accuracy of computational predictions of this flow.