Author: m1k3y

The world heritage nomination of the Qhapaq Ñan (pronounced ca-pac NYAN in the Quechua language of the Incas) is extremely complicated, involving evaluations of 137 sections of the network embodying 273 components, including temples, funerary towers, fortresses and wayside inns, covering about 435 miles of the original 20,000. Only those 435 miles would be designated.

The road system began forming as trails as early as 1000 B.C., Professor Urton at Harvard said, and was developed into a complex network by the Incas in the 15th century A.D., so it was in use for nearly 2,500 years, 3,000 if calculated to the present day.

The Incas, who underwent a spectacular rise to found the largest pre-Columbian empire in South America, expanded these routes into the road network to unite their territory through Cuzco and serve a population of 40,000 spread over thousands of miles, the monuments council evaluation found. Runners carried administrative reports in the form of knotted ropes — the Incas had no written language — traders bought and sold gold and copper, seashells, weapons, feathers, wood, cocoa and textiles, and fresh fish from the Pacific.

After the conquistadors arrived from the north in 1526, they used the roads to subdue the Incas, driving them into remote mountain territories.

“The road network was the life giving support to the Inca Empire integrated into the Andean landscape,” the researchers said.

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Since humans made their first FM radio and television transmissions, signals from Earth have been spilling out into space, announcing the presence of intelligent life to any group that might be searching for it. According to Werthimer, signals from the 1950s television show “I Love Lucy” have reached thousands of stars, while the nearest suns have already enjoyed the “The Simpsons.”

If Earth has unintentionally leaked signs of its presence, other alien civilizations may have done the same thing. SETI’s new Panchromatic project will utilize a variety of telescopes covering a range of frequencies to scour the nearest stars.
“We’re going to throw everything we’ve got at it,” Werthimer added.

The panchromatic project will examine a sample of the 30 stars that lie within 5 parsecs (16 light-years) from the sun. The list includes 13 single stars, seven binary systems and one triple system. Most of the stars are smaller than the sun, but the project will also examine two white dwarfs and one moderately evolved F star. No confirmed exoplanets have been found around any of the stars.

By setting distance as the criteria, the SETI team hopes to alleviate any bias that might otherwise result from focusing on systems similar to that of Earth. The team selected stars for study based only on how far they lie from the sun.

The second SETI project will make use of the observations of multi-planet systems gathered by NASA’s Kepler mission as it attempts to eavesdrop on signals broadcast from one planet to another.

The Kepler telescope detects planets as they pass in front of their stars, causing a dip in the stars’ brightness. If two planets lie in the same orbital plane, pointed toward Earth, they will occasionally line up. If an intelligent species originated on one planet in a system, then went on to explore or inhabit a second planet, signals sent from one planet to the other should be detectable when the two are lined up facing the Earth.

So far, the team has observed about 75 of these events in multi-planet systems using the Green Bank Telescope. The range of radio frequencies include those used on Earth to communicate with craft sent to other planets.

“Our detection algorithms are sensitive to communications like those used by NASA’s Deep Space Network to communicate with spacecraft, so if E.T. broadcasts something similar at sufficient power, we could hear it,” Siemion said.

Detecting such signals doesn’t necessarily mean researchers will be able to translate them. Scientists may not be able to determine if the communication is to an outpost or a rover. However, that won’t make the discovery any less exciting.

Though a signal between planets should be detectable, Siemion said that it is more likely that a broad signal would be intercepted. Although terrestrial television broadcasts in large beams, these would be too weak to detect under the current experiments. Instead, scientists would be looking for something like the U.S. Air Force’s “sky fence,” a high-frequency radar used in an attempt to track space junk in orbit.

Distance poses one of the biggest problems in eavesdropping on extraterrestrials. The required power for a transmitter to be detected increases with the square of the distance. A transmitter 150 light-years away would need to be 100 times as powerful as one 15 light-years away, if everything else remains the same.  
Most of the Kepler planets and planetary candidates lie at significant distances from Earth, making it difficult for scientists to detect weaker signals like those emitted by spacecraft communication. However, if alien civilizations used something akin to Arecibo, Siemion said, scientists would stand a far better chance of detecting it.

http://m.space.com/26392-seti-programs-alien-search-for-life.html
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Little is known about Harriot’s origins other than the fact that he was born in Oxfordshire around 1560 and entered Oxford University in 1577; graduating in 1580 whence he is thought to have moved to London. In 1583 he entered the service of Sir Walter Raleigh, who had been his contemporary at Oxford. He seems to have been a promising mathematician at university as is confirmed by his friendship there with Thomas Allen (1542 – 1632) and Richard Hakluyt (c.1552 – 1616) both acknowledged as leading mathematical practitioners of the age. Harriot served as house mathematicus to Raleigh, teaching his master mariners the then comparatively knew arts of mathematical navigation and cartography for their expeditions, as well as helping to design his ships and serving as his accountant. During his instruction Harriot wrote a manual on mathematical navigation, which included the correct mathematical method for the construction of the Mercator projection but this manual like nearly all of his scientific work was to remain unpublished. However Harriot’s work was not just theoretical he possibly sailed on Raleigh’s 1584 exploratory voyage to Roanoke Island fore the coast of North America and definitely took part in the 1585 – 1586 attempt to establish a colony on Roanoke. This second voyage gives Harriot the distinction of being the first natural philosopher/natural historian/mathematician of North America. During his time in the failed colony Harriot carried out cartographical surveys, studied the flora and fauna and made an anthropological study of the natives even starting to learn the Algonquian language; inventing a phonetic alphabet to record it and writing a grammar of the language.

The attempt to establish a colony ended in disaster and the colonists, including Harriot had to be rescued by Francis Drake, on his way back from harassing the Spanish in Middle America, Raleigh having sailed back to England to fetch more supplies and settlers. This adventure was to provide Harriot’s one and only publication during his lifetime entitled A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia; an advertising pamphlet published in 1588 designed to help Raleigh find new sponsors for a renewed attempt at establishing a colony. This pamphlet, the first English language publication on North America, was reprinted in Latin in a collection of literature about the America’s published in Frankfurt and became known throughout Europe.

In the 1590s he left Raleigh’s service and became a pensioner of Henry Percy, Duke of Northumberland. Percy gave Harriot a very generous pension as well as title to some land in the North of England and a house on his estate of Syon House near London. It appears that Percy required nothing in return from Harriot and had given him what amounted to an extremely generous research grant for life, allowing him to become what we would now call a research scientist. Quite why Percy should choose to take this course of action with Harriot is not known, other than his own interest in the sciences. It was during his time in Percy’s service that Harriot did most of the scientific work that should by rights have made him famous.

Harriot was already, by necessity, a working astronomer during his time as Raleigh’s mathematicus but that his knowledge was wider and deeper than that required for cartography and navigation is obvious from a comment in one of his manuscripts. He complains about the inaccuracies of the Alfonsine Tables based on Ptolemaeus’ Syntaxis Mathematiké and then goes on to state that the Prutenic Tables based on Copernicus’ De revolutionibus are, in the specific case under consideration, even worse. However he’s sure the situation will improve in the future because of the work being carried out by Wilhelm IV and his astronomers in Kassel and Tycho Brahe in Hven. Harriot was obviously well connected and well informed as this before either group had published any of their results.

Now freed of obligations by Percy’s generosity Harriot took up serious astronomical research. In 1607 he and his pupil Sir William Lower (1570 – 1615) made accurate observations of Comet Halley. This led Lower to become the first to suggest in 1610 after they had both read Kepler’s Astronomia Nova that the paths of comets orbits, a hot topic of discussion in the astronomical community of the times, were Keplerian ellipses. Harriot and Lower are considered to be the earliest Keplerian astronomers, accepting Kepler’s theories almost immediately on publication. In 1609 Harriot became probably the first practicing astronomer to make systematic observations of the heavens with the new Dutch instrument invented in the previous year, the telescope. On 26 July 1609 he made a sketch of the moon using a telescope with a magnification of 6. This was several weeks before Galileo first turned a telescope towards the heavens. It should in fairness be pointed out that, unlike Galileo, Harriot did not recognise the three dimensionality of the moons surface. However after seeing a copy of Sidereus Nuncius he drew maps of the moon that were much more complete and accurate than those of his Tuscan rival. He also made the first systematic telescopic study of sunspots, which had he published would have spared Scheiner and Galileo their dispute over which of them had first observed sunspots. Harriot constructed very good telescopes and together with Lower, using one of Harriot’s instruments, continued a programme of observation. Harriot observing in London and Lower in Wales; the two of them comparing there their results in a correspondence parts of which still exist. Harriot also observed the phases of Venus independently of Galileo. Had he published his astronomical work his impact would have been at least as great as that of the Tuscan mathematicus.

In 1603 Raleigh, with whom he was still in close contact, was imprisoned in the Tower of London for treason. He was tried, found guilty and sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted to imprisonment and he remained in the Tower until 1616. In 1605 he was joined in the Tower by Harriot’s new patron, Henry Percy, together with Harriot himself. Percy had been arrested on suspicion because his second cousin, Thomas Percy, who was also the manager of his Syon estate, was one of the principals in the Gunpowder Plot. Harriot it seems was arrested simply because of his connections to Henry Percy and was released without charge within a couple of months. Percy was also never charged, although he was fined a fortune for his cousin’s involvement and remained imprisoned in the Tower until 1621. Percy was an immensely rich man and rented Martin Tower where he set up home even installing a bowling alley. Over the years Harriot regularly visited his two patrons in their stately prison where the three of them discussed scientific problems even conducting some experiments. This was certainly one of the most peculiar scientific societies ever.

Like most astronomers of the time Harriot was also very interested in physical optics because of the role that atmospheric refraction plays in astronomical observations. Harriot discovered the sine law of refraction twenty years before Willebrord Snel after whom the law is usually named. Although Harriot corresponded with Kepler on this very subject, after he had discovered the law, he never revealed his discovery again missing the chance to enter the history of science hall of fame.

Like his contemporaries Galileo and Stevin Harriot was very interested in dynamics and although he failed to abandon the Aristotelian concept that heavier bodies fall faster than lighter ones, his analysis of projectiles in flight is more advanced than Galileo’s. Harriot separately analysed the vertical and horizontal components of the projectiles’ flight and came very close to inventing vector analysis. One historian of science places Harriot’s achievements in dynamics between those of Galileo and Newton but once again he failed to publish.

Harriot’s greatest achievement was probably his algebra book, which was without doubt the most advanced work on the subject produced in the first half of the sixteenth century. It was superior to Viète’s work on the subject although there are some questions as to how much exchange took place between the two men’s efforts, as Nathaniel Torporley an associate of Harriot’s who would become one of his mathematical executors had earlier been Viète’s amanuensis. Harriot gave a complete analysis of the solution of simple algebraic equations that was well in advance of anything previously published. His algebra book was the only one of his works other than his Virginia pamphlet that was actually published if only posthumously. Unfortunately his mathematical executors Torporley and Walter Warner did not understand his innovations and removed them before publication. Even in its castrated form the book was very impressive. The real nature of his work in algebra was obviously known to his near contemporaries leading to John Wallis accusing Descartes of having plagiarised Harriot in his Géométrie. An accusation that probably had more to do with Wallis’ dislike of the French than any real intellectual theft, although Harriot’s work is certainly on a level with the Frenchman’s.

Mathematician, cartographer, navigator, anthropologist, linguist, astronomer, optical physicist, natural philosopher Thomas Harriot was a polymath of astounding breadth and in almost all that he attempted of significant depth. However, for reasons that are still not clear today he chose to publish next to nothing of a life’s work devoted to science.

http://thonyc.wordpress.com/2013/07/05/he-didnt-published-and-so-he-perished-historically/
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Roughly 100 fossil meteorites have emerged from the limestone quarry west of Stockholm, which is being mined for flooring. All of the meteorites are part of an iron-poor class called the L chondrites. They date back about 470 million years to the Ordovician period, when Earth experienced a mysterious burst of new species.

Now miners working in the Swedish quarry have found a meteorite fragment that is not an L chondrite. Analysing its microscopic crystals, Birger Schmitz at Lund University and his colleagues found that the rock dates to the same time period but is of a kind completely unknown to science.

About 515 million years ago, our planet was going through an evolutionary slump. A burst of diversity that happened during the Cambrian period had tapered off, and few new types of animals were emerging. Mysteriously, about 25 million years later life sprang back into action in the early part of the Ordovician, generating loads of species. So what triggered the second explosion?

Fossil meteorites from the quarry suggest that during this time, impacts were tens to hundreds of times more frequent than they are today. The meteorites may have been born when two asteroids collided and broke apart between Mars and Jupiter. The larger object spawned the cloud of L chondrites that bombarded Earth for about 10 million years. According to one popular idea, this intense meteor shower caused just enough destruction to open up ecological niches and drive life to diversify into a richer assortment. But the fate and identity of the smaller asteroid has long been a mystery.

The fact that the latest fossil comes from the same rock layers as the L chondrites suggests that it is a piece of that second asteroid, says Schmitz. The theory says that most of the smaller asteroid was vaporised during the collision, so it also makes sense that only scant fragments of it would remain.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25817-swedish-space-rock-may-be-piece-of-early-life-puzzle.html (via fuckyeahdarkextropian)

PRAISE BE THE ASTEROID!

This is a Holy Relic unto our new cult. It must be venerated.

LIFE GIVER! DEATH DEALER!

We submit to your divine judgment.

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A set of twenty-five well-preserved quipus were found in the archaeological complex of Incahuasi, south of Lima, Alejandro Chu, archaeologist in charge of the site reported on Tuesday.

Chu told Andina News Agency that this is a major finding as the quipus were found in warehouses or kallancas and not in a funerary context, as most discoveries in the past, “what makes us believe they were used for administrative purposes”.

With no written language, the Inca devised a tool for recording the movement of people and goods. A quipu is essentially a group of wool and cotton strings tied together.

The strings are dyed in many different colors, and they are joined together in many different manners and they have a wide variety and number of knots tied in them. Together the type of wool, the colors, the knots and the joins hold information that was once readable by several South American societies.

Many of these quipus were destroyed by the Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century, but approximately 200 of them dating no earlier than about 650 AD have been found.

Although archaeologists do not all agree about the function of the knotted strings, one fairly compelling argument is that the quipu was a method of record keeping.

* translation: it’s a language, but not as eurocentric civilization knows/understands/acknowledges it, modern objects of mystery the result of the near complete and instant cultural erasure of the Americas by invading treasure seeking hordes. Here’s a few they didn’t burn.

Archaeologists find 25 quipus at Inca site in Peru – http://www.peruthisweek.com/news-archaeologists-find-25-quipus-at-inca-site-in-peru-103338

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Crystal cocoons kept bacteria safe in space   

fuckyeahdarkextropian:

Several hundred million years after Earth formed, when life was emerging, our young planet had an atmosphere, oceans and primordial continents. But it did not yet have an ozone layer to shield the surface from the sun’s harshest ultraviolet rays. Because UV radiation can damage DNA, that would have made it difficult for any but the most extreme forms of life to survive.

In 2002, a team led by astrobiologist Charles Cockell at the University of Edinburgh, UK, discovered a unique group of cyanobacteria in Haughton crater in northern Canada. The bacteria live in tiny pores and cracks of near-translucent rock, formed during the intense heat and pressure of the asteroid or comet impact that made the crater, about 23 million years ago.

Cockell’s team found that the altered crystal structure of the rocks absorbed and reflected UV rays. This suggests the rock could shield the bacteria while letting enough sunlight through to allow them to photosynthesise.

Complex life evolved long before the crater formed, but there have been countless space rock strikes in Earth’s history. “That raised a whole bunch of questions about whether the unique geology of impact craters could have been a good UV shield on the early Earth,” says Casey Bryce, a member of Cockell’s lab.

Bryce and her colleagues got an unusual chance to test the notion in 2008. As part of the European Space Agency’s EXPOSE mission, the team sent some of the crater rocks to the International Space Station (ISS). Before lift-off, they grew samples of the cyanobacteria either in plain glass discs or in discs of the impact-altered rock. Once in space, these discs were mounted on the outside of the ISS, where they were left exposed for nearly two years.

The bacteria received radiation doses far more intense than conditions on early Earth. When the samples were returned to the lab, the microbes in the glass discs were dead.

“However, when we cracked open the impact-shocked rocks we were able to detect chemical signals of life and rejuvenate the dormant cyanobacteria,” says Bryce. The team’s findings provide the first direct evidence that crystal cocoons formed by impacts might have been radiation-proof cradles for early life.

Asteroid and comet impacts are ubiquitous in the solar system, so Pontefract thinks impacts could have helped kick-start life on rocky planets and then shielded whatever emerged. Crater rocks could provide refuges even now for life on other planets, such as Mars, she says.

I just wanna rant about directed panspermia and ancient aliens and start an Asteroid Cult and… maybe I’ll finally set up the basic podcast kit I got for Xmas tomorrow.

Crystal cocoons kept bacteria safe in space   

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Giordano Bruno (1548-1600)

Bruno was one of the most original and colorful thinkers of the Renaissance. The Inquisition considered him a dangerous heretic, and had him burned at the stake in 1600.

The Italian philosopher and mage Giordano Bruno was born in Nola, near Naples, in 1548. He became a Dominican friar in 1563, but was forced to leave the order after accusations of heresy in 1576. From 1576 to 1585 lived in Paris where his book De Umbris Idearum, “the Shadows of Ideas” published in 1582 and lectures on the Art of Memory attracted the attention of the French King Henry III. Bruno took the ars memoria or Art of Memory, a classical technique of mnemonic coding using the measured placement of visual images to new heights exploiting its philosophical and magical possibilities. Here is a translation by Nigel Jackson of forty nine of Bruno’s planetary images from De Umbris Idearum.

From 1583 to 1585 he lived under the protection of the French ambassador, Michel de Castelnau. While in England he published a number of works including Cena de le Ceneri, “The Ash Wednesday Supper”, Spaccio della bestia trinofante, “The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast” and De l’Infinito, Universo e Mondi, “On the Infinite Universe and Worlds”. The latter work and his support of a Copernican heliocentric astronomy earned Bruno an entirely undeserved reputation as an early “scientist” and “modern” thinker. In fact, Bruno was clearly a figure of the late medieval and Renaissance, a mage who sought what he saw as the restoration of the true religion, that of Egyptian Hermeticism.

Bruno lived and lectured throughout Germany from 1586 to 1591 when he made the mistake of going to Venice where he was arrested by the Inquisition. After initially recanting his views, after being sent to Rome he abjured his recantation and was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1600.

A number of Bruno’s works are available on-line at Jonathan Peterson’s excellent web site, Esoteric Archives though many are in Latin. The Ash Wednesday Supper and the Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast are available in English translation as is “On Magic” and “A General Account of Bonding” which appear in Cause, Principle and Unity edited by Blackwell and De Lucca (Cambridge, 1998). Two excellent secondary sources on Bruno are Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition by Frances Yates (Chicago, 1964) and Eros and Magic in the Renaissance by Ioan Coulianu (Chicago, 1987).

Bruno’s magic can be considered under two basic categories, that of memory and phantasmic images and that of bonding or enchaining. Bruno has been described as an artist of memory and in his forty nine planetary images we can see his poetic skill at visual description. The scenes described by Bruno are often full of action and are a focused and detailed evocation of the various planetary natures. These visual images are meant to penetrate into the pneuma, the spirit or astral body. There reflected in the mirror of the spiritus they can be apprehended by the soul and the knowledge and wisdom contained in them accepted by it. Bruno emphasizes the importance of the creation of bonds or chains, called vincula in magic. Of these the Erotic bond is supreme. Vinculum quippe vinculorum amor est or “Love is the bond of bonds”.

“All affections and bonds of the will are reduced to two, namely aversion and desire, or hatred and love. Yet hatred itself is reduced to love, whence it follows that the will’s only bond is Eros.”

Giordano Bruno, Theses de Magia, Vol. LVI quoted in Coulianu, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance (Chicago, 1987) page 91.

Bruno goes on to say that, “There are three gates through which the hunter of souls [animarum venator] ventures to bind: vision, hearing and mind or imagination. If it happens that someone passes through all three of these gates, he binds most powerfully and ties down most tightly.”

“A General Account of Bonding” from Cause, Principle and Unity, ed. Blackwell & Lucca (Cambridge, 1997) page 155.

We can see the importance of this to the creation and consecration of our astrological images,  “He who enters through the gate of hearing is armed with his voice and with speech, the son of voice. He who enters through the gate of vision is armed with suitable forms, gestures, motions and figures. He who enters through the gate of the imagination, mind and reason is armed with customs and the arts.”

“A General Account of Bonding” from Cause, Principle and Unity, ed. Blackwell & Lucca (Cambridge, 1997) page 155.
Thus images are magical, not only in their ability to communicate with the soul, but also in their use by the magician in the creation of the vincula or chains that are indispensible to this art.

Here are two examples of actual talismans and elections for their construction that rely on Bruno’s planetary images, a Venus talisman and a Sun talisman. Here is a Jupiter image created by Nigel Jackson using Bruno’s planetary description.

Some works

Books in print

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Institute of Network Cultures | No. 07: Radical Tactics of the Offline Library, Henry Warwick

fuckyeahdarkextropian:

The radical tactics of the offline: abandoning the online for more secure offline transfer. Taking inspiration from ancient libraries as copying centers and Sneakernet, Henry Warwick describes the future of the library as digital and offline. Radical Tactics of the Offline Library traces the history of the library and the importance of the Personal Portable Library in sharing knowledge and resisting proprietarian forces.

The library in Alexandria contained about 500,000 scrolls; the Library of Congress, the largest library in the history of civilization, contains about 35 million publications. A digital version of it would fit on a 24 terabyte array, which can be purchased for about $2000. Obviously, most people don’t need 35 million books. A small local library of 10,000 books could fit on a 64 GB thumb drive the size of a pack of chewing gum and costing perhaps $40.

I’ve got this 1TB drive I’ve been slowly filling with esoteric texts, key documentaries, cult movies and classic tv shows. Enough material to keep me going for a 100 years.

“He was last seen leaving the city in a beat up diesel Hilux, his dog at his side. The back loaded with trunks of books and camping gear. Solar panels and 3D bio printers. Headed for the desert|forest|mountains. Amazon Drones only know where exactly.”

I’ll put it all up on TPB before I go.

Institute of Network Cultures | No. 07: Radical Tactics of the Offline Library, Henry Warwick

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