Read moreLittle 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for the construction of the Mercator projection but this manual like nearly all of his scientific work was to remain unpublished.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.
Quotes
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)
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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.
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
In short, while globalization is indeed undermining national political institutions and thus national identities and loyalties, what appears to be replacing the national is not the “global” political identity that “cosmopolitical” dreamers have long aspired to, but rather a return to localized identities rooted in clan, sect, ethnicity, corporation, and gang. In literary terms, this future has more in common with Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash than it does with Gene Rodenberry’s Federation utopia in Star Trek.
The ultimate losers in all of this, of course, are the middle classes—the people who “play by the rules” by going to school and getting traditional middle-class jobs whose chief virtue is stability. These sorts of people, who lack the ruthlessness to act as criminal insurgents or the resources to act as plutocratic insurgents, can only watch as institutions built over the course of the 20th century to ensure a high quality of life for a broad majority of citizens are progressively eroded. As the social bases of collective action crumble, individuals within the middle classes may increasingly face a choice: accept a progressive loss of social security and de facto social degradation, or join one of the two insurgencies.
The Twin Insurgency – http://www.the-american-interest.com/articles/2014/06/15/the-twin-insurgency/
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Herpes viruses have been infecting and co-diverging with their vertebrate hosts for hundreds of millions of years. The primate simplex viruses exemplify this pattern of virus-host co-divergence, at a minimum, as far back as the most recent common ancestor of New World monkeys, Old World monkeys, and apes.
Humans are the only primate species known to be infected with two distinct herpes simplex viruses: HSV-1 and HSV-2. Human herpes simplex viruses are ubiquitous, with over two-thirds of the human population infected by at least one virus.
Here, we investigated whether the additional human simplex virus is the result of ancient viral lineage duplication or cross-species transmission.
Evolutionary Origins of Human Herpes Simplex Viruses 1 and 2 – http://m.mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/06/04/molbev.msu185.abstract
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Read moreBut whence the week? Throughout history, human societies have found it useful to divide time into groups of days shorter than a lunar month. One of the most common uses of this cycle has been to establish a regular market day, though just how regular varies. At one point, the Basques evidently employed a three-day week. For centuries, China, Japan, and Korea employed a 10-day week. Other societies have employed four-, five-, six-, eight-, and nine-day weeks.
So how did lucky No. 7 come to rule our calendars? It all began logically enough, when the ancient Babylonians divided their lunar months into four, yielding weeks that were mostly seven days. Then superstition kicked in. The final day of the week came to be considered evil or unlucky, and certain taboos developed around that day—against eating meat, for example.
It’s likely that the Babylonian week was the model for the seven-day Jewish week, with its own taboos against certain behaviors on the seventh day, or Sabbath. Babylon also probably served as the source of another important seven-day week used in Hellenistic Alexandria. The influence of that week remains with us in the names of heavenly bodies it assigned to each day—like Saturn-day, Sun-day, and Moon-day.
Meanwhile, the Romans marked time differently, which is why you never heard of anyone warning Caesar to “beware the third Tuesday in March!” Roman lunar months began on the Kalends, which scholars believe coincided with the new moon. The Ides, which fell on the 13th or 15th day of a month, coincided with the full moon. The Romans also kept an eight-day market week.
As Christianity—which kept the Jewish week but moved the Sabbath to Sunday—and Egyptian astrology gained influence in the empire, so did the seven-day week. Constantine, the first Christian emperor, made it official in 321. Since then, the spread of Christianity’s influence—as well as that of Islam, which also employs a seven-day week—has imposed the seven-day cycle on most of the world.
But there’s nothing inevitable about the ceaseless repetition of six days of work, one day of rest. As labor has become both more productive and more organized, the week has evolved. The writer Witold Rybczynski traces the emergence of the weekend to 19th century England, when the British agricultural revolution made land and labor more productive. At first, Rybczynski relates, this allowed workers extra leisure, which they enjoyed spontaneously—not according to any ironclad schedule. As the Industrial Revolution became a driving force in trans-Atlantic civilization, the push for greater efficiency demanded standardization of this extra leisure. In 1926, Henry Ford began shutting his factories on Saturdays in a bid to crystallize an American convention of a two-day weekend full of recreation (that he hoped would involve driving). It worked.
So why don’t we see advanced civilizations swarming across the Universe? One problem may be climate change. It is not that advanced civilizations always destroy themselves by over-heating their biospheres (although that is a possibility). Instead, because stars become brighter as they age, most planets with an initially life-friendly climate will become uninhabitably hot long before intelligent life emerges.
The Earth has had four billion years of good weather despite our Sun burning a lot more fuel than when Earth was formed. We can estimate the amount of warming this should have produced thanks to the scientific effort to predict the consequences of man-made greenhouse-gas emissions.
These models predict that our planet should warm by a few degrees centigrade for each percentage increase in heating at Earth’s surface. This is roughly the increased heating produced by carbon dioxide at the levels expected for the end of the 21st century. (Incidentally, that is where the IPCC prediction of global warming of around three degrees Celsius comes from.)
Over the past half-billion years, a time period for which we have reasonable records of Earth’s climate, the Sun’s surface temperature increased by four percent, and terrestrial temperatures should have risen by roughly 10 degrees Celsius. But the geological record shows that, if anything, on average temperatures fell.
Simple extrapolations show that over the whole history of life, temperatures should have risen by almost 100 degrees Celsius. If that were true, early life must have emerged upon a completely frozen planet. Yet, the young Earth had liquid water on its surface. So what’s going on?
The answer is that it’s not only the Sun that has changed. The Earth also evolved, with the appearance of land plants around 400 million years ago changing atmospheric composition and the amount of heat Earth reflects back into space. There has also been geological change with the continental area steadily growing through time as volcanic activity added to the land-mass. This too had an effect on the atmosphere and Earth’s reflectivity.
Remarkably, biological and geological evolution have generally produced cooling, and this has compensated for the warming effect of our aging Sun. There have been times when compensation was too slow or too fast, and the Earth warmed or cooled, but not once since life first emerged has liquid water completely disappeared from the surface.
Our planet has therefore miraculously moderated climate change for four billion years. This observation led to the development of the Gaia hypothesis that a complex biosphere automatically regulates the environment in its own interests. However, Gaia lacks a credible mechanism and has probably confused cause and effect: a reasonably stable environment is a precondition for a complex biosphere, not the other way around.
Other inhabited planets in the Universe must also have found ways to prevent global warming. Watery worlds suitable for life will have climates that, like the Earth, are highly sensitive to changing circumstances. The repeated canceling of star-induced warming by “geobiological” cooling, required to keep such planets habitable, will have needed many coincidences, and the vast majority of such planets will have run out of luck long before sentient beings evolved.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/06/why-havent-we-encountered-aliens-yet-the-answer-could-be-climate-change/ (via fuckyeahdarkextropian)
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A solar system full of dead worlds and moons.
Dried up sea beds of underground oceans rich in the fossils of life that lasted just a while. And the ones that made it in their own unique way.
Let’s go see.
Read moreMany of the astronauts that White interviews argue that the experience would be a powerful political tonic, if you could somehow impel it upon the rulers of the planet. As Joseph Allen, a veteran of several Space-Shuttle flights, said:
A steady stream of world leaders should go into orbit. It would have a profound affect on their wisdom …. It is similar to the time of Copernicus; we have a broadened view of our place in the universe, and more educated view.
In his book Moondust, the author Andrew Smith argues that the moon landing was in some respects an art project, as gesture “as primitive as song”. We went there not so much to see the moon as to gaze back at Earth. It was “a unique opportunity to look at ourselves,” he writes, an accomplishment less of technology than of aesthetics, culture, and spirituality. “How madly, perfectly human.” Many of the astronauts White interviews in The Overview Effect lament the difficulty they have in putting their new perspective into words, of communicating its sheerly alien quality to other people. Gemini X astronaut Michael Collins concluded that that the ideal crew for an Apollo mission would have been a “philosopher, a priest, and a poet.” (“Unfortunately,” he added, “they would kill themselves trying to fly the spacecraft.”)
Read moreFirst of all it’s clear that after 70 years without war in the West, we are no longer aware of the danger posed by the government’s file cabinets. The censuses, the raids, and the killing of communists, homosexuals, the mentally ill, gypsies and Jews would today be facilitated by a tool a thousand times more tragically effective and finely tuned than those available back in 1940. But very few people truly realize this because they did not live through the war. What are the Chinese or Korean dictatorships doing on this subject, the Russian crypto-dictatorship, the Israeli police state so prodigiously equipped to track any Arab dissent? We turn our heads away so as not to see. OK. There are two possible reactions (ignorance, detachment), but both undoubtedly miss the essential point of our acceptance of the worst.
Here I’d like to venture a hypothesis; actually a thesis. This thesis would be the following: the delicate web of surveillance on citizen-customers by those who govern us “vertically” (State powers as well as the liberal powers held by multinationals on the internet) is so amazingly tolerated because it is anchored, “horizontally” in the social practices of mutual checks that occur daily, are familiar, and have become natural. In other words, the NSA sprouts from a social soil that has made self control, control of others and control of the world through technology, proof of a bond, an ethos, a way of life. The stem grows from the rhizomes.
I control myself, you control me, we control ourselves, they control us. Surveillance, management and control become fractalized so that between the mother who sneaks onto the Facebook account of her daughter, the employer who scans the flaws of a job applicant on the web, the husband who reads his wife’s SMS messages and looks at her credit card bills, the retiree who monitors his vacation home with a webcam connected to a motion detector, and the NSA, all the way on top, which runs surveillance on Alcatel, Merkel, J. Schmoe, and Strauss-Kahn. Between all these there is one recurring theme, the same sordid twist, the same economy of desire focused on prevention, fear, and the total control over anything that can surprise, can divert, and can live.
This morning, January 8, 2014, a Palestinian was killed by an Israeli drone, at distance, “cleanly”. Cameras are put in Teddy Bears to reassure parents. Babysitters and our empty houses are filmed. Our cell phones are triangulated, our travels are synchronized, our breathing space is restricted. We put tracking devices in our shoes, toll passes in our pockets because we are in flux, and microchips in the ears of our cats, our dogs and our sheep. The trees in Paris are barcoded. They can remotely hack into the braking system of a car, into a pacemaker in a beating heart. They can disrupt a GPS so that you get lost, activate the webcam on your computer, listen in around you with your smartphone. They manufacture the Xbox One which can constantly monitor your game room, can know which movies you watch, can know which games you play, can know how many people are on your couch, and can measure the volume and the light that enters. These features were quickly removed after facing an outcry that Microsoft never anticipated given that the logic of control has become so natural.
The truth is that we are being mithridatized. We are becoming dangerously acclimated to this subtle poison ingested daily, to this new form of an intimate grip of control and the extensive power that Deleuze diagnosed back in 1990 as our entry into the Societies of Control; and under this yoke we are being gently twisted. The truth is that this control is no longer simply placed and received. It is no longer simply imposed contemptuously, in the form of a pyramid of discipline, which falls upon us, the sad victims of the panoptic powers of the State, of Capital and of Mafias – inciting by its alienating grip strength, resistance, and revolts. No, it’s much better than that.
This desire to control, this impulse towards surveillance and frantic security now runs through each of every one of us. It takes shape and wires itself into our nerves. Everyone becomes the relay, the peddler, the exchanges are made with joy and fear. Everyone gets off on playing their roles as cops, all-powerful bosses, or low-life voyeurs. You control your house, your car, your purchases. He scans his wife’s emails, tracks his daughter with geolocation, and limits the duration of his son’s internet connection. She checks her pulse, controls her blood pressure, counts her calories, and her steps. You filter your calls, track down your ex on Facebook, Google the chick you met at the bar yesterday rather than letting her reveal as much as she wants you to know. And you are offered all the personal and idle tools for that; all the apps; all the flashy hardware for geeks with just a click of a mouse and a beep.
Since music is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man.
anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (via jtotheizzoe)
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The Committee to Nuke Elysium 