tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26868403188089613642024-03-09T18:46:24.841-08:00A Strange ManuscriptDiscussions about the universe and its contents.Robert Leblinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08265093977381441210noreply@blogger.comBlogger25125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686840318808961364.post-40107241508377584102019-11-09T02:33:00.002-08:002019-11-09T02:33:53.806-08:00Pocket Nostradamus: The A.I. Wars, or Turning Over Governance to Machines<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Here is an unnerving prediction: </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">The relentless global expansion of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) will spread from companies to governments. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Humans will turn over local, state and national government to machines. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">While A.I. runs things, people will devote most of their time and resources to the entertainment industry.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Under A.I. leadership, countries will wage war upon each other, using human beings as combat fodder, in a bid to reduce population, greenhouse gases and energy consumption.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14.666666984558105px;">Sounds fun, right?</span></span></div>
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Robert Leblinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08265093977381441210noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686840318808961364.post-40311712935532653102019-06-19T09:48:00.001-07:002019-06-19T09:51:22.653-07:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">Giant African Snails & Fake Facts: A Cautionary Tale<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Giant African Snail (<i>Achatina fulica</i>)</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">A recent Australian news feature on giant African snails led this blogger to undertake some casual research on this remarkable species, known to scientists as <i>Achatina fulica</i>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">The quest led to discovery of a chunk of false information, hiding in plain sight on Wikipedia. It served as a reminder that “fake news” isn’t the only problem we encounter on the Web and in social media generally; “fake facts” are also sitting out there on a myriad of websites, just waiting to be discovered.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">The news feature that aroused my interest was “Giant African snails: A biosecurity threat too big to ignore for Australian agriculture,” appearing on Australia’s ABC News Rural on May 29. The </span><span style="color: #954f72; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2019-05-30/giant-african-snails-a-biosecurity-threat-too-big-to-ignore/11049650" style="color: #954f72; text-decoration: underline;">feature itself</a> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">was fine; I didn’t have any problems with it. Among its fascinating tidbits:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "symbol"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-size: 11pt;">The fast-breeding world's largest land snail, the giant African snail, is considered one of the world's top invasive species<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Nowadays, when folks find something of interest on the Web and want more info, they often use a well-worn route to further discovery: first search on Google, then read an article on Wikipedia. Unfortunately, many people often end their inquiries at this point. But there’s no guarantee that what you are reading on Wikipedia is accurate. Often you need to check the sources cited there to make sure what you are reading is true.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Sadly, </span><span style="color: #954f72; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achatina_fulica" style="color: #954f72; text-decoration: underline;">the article</a> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">on “Achatina fulica” contains some “fake facts.” As often happens, the bogus info appears in a paragraph without any footnotes:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">In some regions, an effort has been made to promote use of the giant African snail as a food resource in order to reduce its populations. However, promoting a pest in this way is a controversial measure, because it may encourage the further deliberate spread of the snails.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">One particularly catastrophic attempt to biologically control this species occurred on South Pacific Islands. Colonies of <i>A. fulica</i> were introduced as a food reserve for the American military during World War II and they escaped. A carnivorous species (Florida rosy wolfsnail, <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euglandina_rosea" style="color: #954f72; text-decoration: underline;">Euglandina rosea</a></i>) was later introduced by the United States government, in an attempt to control <i>A. fulica</i> but the rosy wolf snail instead heavily preyed upon the native <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partula_(genus)" style="color: #954f72; text-decoration: underline;" title="Partula (genus)">Partula</a></i>, causing the extinction of most <i>Partula</i> species within a decade.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Some additional research using the article’s general references led to the discovery that the above passage was rife with errors or possibly deliberate distortions. The second paragraph is the problematic one. It conflates a number of real facts and mixes in some bogus ones.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Further research revealed that the American military was NOT responsible for introducing the giant African snail in the South Pacific. (Those of you familiar with the U.S. and its military will realize that (a) the United States does not regard giant African snails as a food source and (b) the American military would never even think of developing a food reserve of this kind. Potatoes, maybe, but not land snails.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">The giant African snail appeared in different parts of the South Pacific at various times, mostly prior to World War II. It turns out that some Japanese enjoyed eating them. And while, the Japanese government realized the danger of this invasive species and barred its citizens from importing the giant snails, some people brought them into Japan covertly. Other Japanese, apparently including Japanese soldiers during World War II, either deliberately or accidentally may carried giant African snails to various Pacific islands.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">One American </span><a href="http://hilgardia.ucanr.edu/Abstract/?a=hilg.v26n16p643" style="color: #954f72; text-decoration: underline;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">study</span></a><span style="font-size: 11pt;">, “Studies on Control of the Giant African Snail on Guam” by Gordon D. Peterson, Jr. (<i>Hilgardia: A Journal of Agricultural Science</i>, July 1957), cites a report about the snail’s introduction on Guam:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Guerrero's report presents evidence that <i>Achatina fulica</i>may have been introduced during the Japanese occupation. He gives an account of his interview with one Jose I. Shimizu, a Japanese half-caste and an old resident of Guam. Shimizu stated that his father, a Japanese national, had learned of the accidental importation of snails with sweet potatoes from the island of Rota in 1943 and had informed the Japanese Governor-Commandant of his discovery. Shimizu also stated that while he was imprisoned at the Island Command Stockade following American reoccupation of Guam, he overheard Japanese prisoners of war telling of their having eaten snails while they were hiding in the jungle.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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The same study says that if American forces introduced the giant snail into Guam after taking control of the island from the Japanese, it would have been done accidentally. The snails are very talented at hitching rides in loads of vegetables, hollow pipes, etc.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Another <a href="http://www.issg.org/cii/Electronic%20references/pii/references/sherley_invasivespecies_in_the_pacific_a_technical_review_and_draft_regiona_strategy.pdf" style="color: #954f72; text-decoration: underline;">report</a> on “Invasive Species of the Pacific” by the South Pacific Regional Environment Programme (Samoa, 2000) notes that elsewhere in the Pacific, specifically in Hawaii, the U.S. government did introduce a number of species of carnivorous snails in an unsuccessful bid to eliminate the giant African snail. The unfortunate result was serious damage to native snail species – and <i>A. fulica </i>was apparently unaffected by its carnivorous cousins.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Bottom line: </b>Be careful about accepting information uncritically from Wikipedia and similar websites. Always check the sources, and the sources of the sources. You’ll be glad you did.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Robert Leblinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08265093977381441210noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686840318808961364.post-26066390427495014512019-01-21T09:35:00.001-08:002019-01-21T09:35:39.363-08:00The Two-Headed Sea Serpent<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgotmUKgtDGCUmw4Allus7L93EZJqqeCs13AvPZA7LD34kKh0cNIGRPJrRfycrfqD6nfWwsq9D_JKp7OhDpp4PJIauBXD3fDU6GqD9GScgVCdWy1YBvQEjx_Qk0rq7qJmRKbDpVDzryB88/s1600/231_01_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="203" data-original-width="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgotmUKgtDGCUmw4Allus7L93EZJqqeCs13AvPZA7LD34kKh0cNIGRPJrRfycrfqD6nfWwsq9D_JKp7OhDpp4PJIauBXD3fDU6GqD9GScgVCdWy1YBvQEjx_Qk0rq7qJmRKbDpVDzryB88/s1600/231_01_1.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(102, 102, 102); color: #666666; font-family: verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 9.600000381469727px;">Right-hand head of Aztec double-headed <br />serpent, British Museum</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: 14.666666984558105px;">In February 1899, a cargo ship brought to Sydney, Australia, the skeletal remains of a huge “two-headed sea serpent” – said originally to weigh seventy tons and extend sixty feet in length – that was found on a beach on Rakahanga island in the Solomons. The find was significant enough to reach the newspapers in the United States. </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">On April 5 of that year, the <i>Los Angeles Herald </i>described the discovery as follows:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">The steamship Warrimoo, from Australia, brings an authenticated story from Sydney of a tidal </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">wave which washed ashore an immense two-headed sea serpent on Rakahanga island of the </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Solomon group. The creature’s weight is given as seventy tons and its length is sixty feet. The </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">skeleton was brought to Sydney by the steamer Emu and presented to the New South Wales </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">museum.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">It’s not clear which museum received the sea serpent bones. Today there are many museums in Sydney and New South Wales. A search of the website of Sydney’s Australian Museum – a likely home for natural science finds – turned up no “sea serpent” bones from Rakahanga (or from anywhere).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">We managed to dig up more details on the find from Australia’s <i>Sydney Morning Herald</i>(Feb. 23, 1899). The <i>Morning Herald </i>account is more detailed and varies slightly from the <i>Los Angeles Herald </i>report. The story is recounted in part by A.G. Bell, identified as the supercargo on the steamer <i>Emu</i>. Bell said that while the tidal wave devastated Rakahanga Island, the sea serpent was actually found washed up on a beach on Suwarrow Island, 422 km southwest of Rakahanga:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">“It was at Manihiki that we were informed of a tidal wave. We had had a very high sea, though no wind to cause it, and the supposition is that on or about the 17th of last month a tremendous submarine eruption occurred. In the Solomons, you have heard, they experienced it, and the natives of Manihiki were in great dread of it, seeing its approach for miles, like a great black wall, as if it would demolish the whole island. Manihiki came out of it with little damage, but one of the most beautiful isles of Oceania was all but swept off the face of the waters. This was Rakahanga. Villages were washed away, the natives taking to the bush, having been forewarned by the roar of the approaching wave. It is counted as one of the high islands in that part of the Pacific, but from all that we heard the mountain of waters swept it like a sea-level shore, and it was miraculous how the people escaped, if indeed they did so….</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">"Now we come to the most remarkable incident in our voyage," went on the supercargo, and the brightening of his eyes easily foretold that something most unusual was about to be narrated. "After we left Manihiki we returned to Suwarraw [<i>sic</i>] on our way back to Sydney, and while there the natives carelessly remarked that 'one big devil devil' from the sea had washed ashore a little way off two months ago. They did not know its name, only that it had two heads. We went along the beach to where the gigantic animal lay, and long before we reached the scene of the stranding the stench was so horrible we were on the point of abandoning the 'catch.' On getting within sight of it, however, its extraordinary appearance determined us upon acquiring possession of it, and after perils by sea, and worse dangers from the poisoned air, we secured the first sea serpent ever brought to Australia – perhaps to any other place."</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Asked by the newspaper’s reporter where the sea serpent was now, Bell replied: "Down in the hold of the steamer, and it will not be unloaded for a day or two – when the vessel comes in to discharge at Parbury's Wharf."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">At that point, someone from the shipping company that owned the <i>Emu</i>entered the picture:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">At this juncture the representative of the Pacific Islands Company came in to see the supercargo, and remarked that he intended to present the skeleton to the Sydney Museum. It was a pity he said that only the two heads, the two backbones, and part of the ribs had been secured, but as the supercargo observed, "To stay longer collecting the remains would have nauseated the collectors, perhaps beyond recovery,"</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">From Captain Oliver's (the master of the steamer) account there was but one body, which had a double spine, and two distinct heads. It is the two heads and the other portions just mentioned that they were so careful to secure. In their descriptions both the supercargo and the captain agree. They say that its hide or skin was a brownish colour, and covered with hair; that the heads somewhat resemble horses' heads. The approximate weight of the great sea serpent, whence the remains aboard the Emu were taken, is given at not less than 70 tons, its length fully 60 ft.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">The <i>Morning Herald </i>mentioned several other accounts of sea serpents in the South Pacific, and then concluded its article with a quote from the manager of the Pacific Islands Company:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10.5pt;">"Sensational sea serpent stories have been repeated scores of times, but there is no getting away from the actual heads and parts of the frame of this animal secured at Suwarrow by our steamer, and now on board. Whatever naturalists may think of the existence or non-existence of this denizen of the sea depths, here are the proofs, the most interesting proofs from a zoological point of view probably on record."</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">What ultimately happened to the mysterious two-headed skeleton, we’re unable to say at this point. But we’ll keep searching….<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Robert Leblinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08265093977381441210noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686840318808961364.post-9349333323954146022018-12-07T23:16:00.000-08:002018-12-09T08:33:53.761-08:00The Human Magnet Stone <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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The <i>bahit</i>, or human magnet stone, was widely accepted as real by geographers and historians of the Middle Ages. This stone – sometimes also called <i>baht</i> – reputedly had the power to attract human beings to it, who would then be held fast to it until they died. The <i>bahit </i>was associated with the legendary City of Brass, described in the Thousand and One Nights. The lost city's exterior walls were said to have been built of solid brass blocks, but the interior walls were believed by some to have been constructed of <i>bahit </i>stone. In fact, the City of Brass is sometimes called El Baht.</div>
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The stone is described by various writers, among them Ibn Fadl Allah al-‘Umari (1301-1349) of Damascus, who authored an unconventional encyclopedia – a combination universal history and world geography – called <i>Masalik al-absar fi mamalik al-amsar</i>, “Pathways of Vision in the Realms of the Metropolises.” This work has never been published in its entirety. But a section that has been published (Section One, ed. Ahmed Zaki, Vol. 1, Cairo 1342/1924) talks about the <i>bahit</i> stone…<i style="font-weight: bold;"><o:p></o:p></i></div>
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All mountains are branches of the range which encircles most of the inhabited world. It is called Jabal al-Qaf and is the mother of mountains, for they all stem from it….<br />
<o:p> </o:p>This side-chain of the Jabal al-Qaf is called at its beginning [i.e. the eastern end] al-Mujarrid. Then it extends until it reaches, in the western section, a longitude of 65 degrees from the beginning of the Maghreb….<br />
<o:p> </o:p>A chain called the Mountains of the Moon branches off here. The Nile rises in it. It is said that glittering stones are to be found there which gleam like white silver. They are called <i>sanjat al-bahit. </i>Anyone who sees one laughs and cleaves to it till he dies. It is also called the “human magnet” (<i>maghnatis al-nas</i>). The author of [the] <i>Jughrafiya </i>[“Geography” – presumably Ptolemy is meant here] says that Aristotle mentions it in his Book of Stones (<i>Kitab al-ahjar</i>)….<br />
<o:p> </o:p>There are numerous accounts of the origins of the course of the Nile. Al-Mas‘udi and others give worthless information. The most commonly expressed view is that somebody or other has actually seen its source, and each writer puts forward a reason for the failure to find out the truth about it.<br />
<o:p> </o:p>Some say: “Some persons reached the mountains [where the Nile rises], climbed them, and saw beyond them a heaving sea with water black as night split by a river white as day which entered the mountains on the south and came out on the north, where it divided into branches at the dome of Hermes, which is built there. They assert that the builder of this dome was Hirmis al-Haramisa (Hermes of the Hermeses), who is called the Threefold in Wisdom [Trismegistus], while others claim that he is Idris (peace be upon him!), who reached that place and there built a dome; and they say that he is called the Threefold because he combines three things: prophethood, wisdom, and kingship.”<br />
<o:p> </o:p>Others say: “Some persons climbed the mountain, but each time one of them stepped forward he would laugh, clap his hands, and fling himself down the far side. The rest feared to suffer the same fate, and so came back.”<br />
<o:p> </o:p>Others make this assertion: “What these persons mentioned about actually saw was the <i>bahit </i>stone. Everyone from among them who saw it laughed, stepped forward, and cleaved to it until he died.”</blockquote>
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The celebrated geographer al-Idrisi mentions the human magnet stone in the well-known work he penned for the Norman King of Sicily, Roger II – <i>Nuzhat al-mushtaq fî ikhtiraq al-afaq</i> (“The Pleasure of Him Who Longs to Cross the Horizons”), completed in 1154….<i style="font-weight: bold;"><o:p></o:p></i></div>
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[<i>The First Section of the Second Clime</i>]<br />
<o:p> </o:p>On the coast of the sea that stretches away from these [the Fortunate Isles] and other islands, ambergris of excellent quality is found. From its coasts, too, comes the <i>baht </i>stone, which is famous among the people of al-Maghrib al-Aqsa. Single specimens of that stone are sold at great price, especially in the country of the Lamtûna, who relate that if a person sets out to fulfill some need, and takes hold of such a stone, he will succeed in full. They assert, too, that it is good for tongue-tie….</blockquote>
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A Syrian writer, al-Dimashqi (1256-1327), briefly mentions the <i>bahit</i> stone in <i>Nukhbat al-dahr fî ‘aja’ib al-barr wa-’l-bahr</i>, “The Choice of the Age, on the Marvels of Land and Sea”…<b style="font-style: italic;"><o:p></o:p></b></div>
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[The sources of the Nile are ten streams which flow into two lakes situated beyond the Equator.]<br />
<o:p> </o:p>According to Qudama one of the ten streams, the most westerly, is called Aliha. Its water issues from beneath the <i>bahit</i>stone, the human magnet (<i>maghnatis al-nas</i>).</blockquote>
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The earliest reference to the <i>bahit</i> or <i>baht</i> stone that I’ve been able to find appears in a work by historian-geographer Ibn al-Fakih al-Hamadhani, who wrote in the late 9<sup>th </sup>and early 10<sup>th </sup>centuries. Ibn al-Fakih mentions the human magnet stone in his <i>Kitab al-Buldan</i> (“Book of the Countries”), a work which remains largely untranslated but is summarized in the <i>Compendium libri Kitab al-Boldan </i>(Leiden: 1885). Ibn al-Fakih applies the name <i>baht</i> to a lost city in the North African desert that he later identifies with the City of Brass…<i style="font-weight: bold;"><o:p></o:p></i></div>
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Alexander constructed the city of <i>Baht </i>in the Maghreb: it was called The Splendid or The Brilliant. It was constructed of a stone called <i>el baht</i>. Anyone who looks at it loses his mind and laughs in a manner so prolonged and reckless that he perishes.</blockquote>
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Later on, he mentions the city again:<i style="font-weight: bold;"><o:p></o:p></i></div>
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Among the marvelous things of the region of Sous (Moroccan), it is necessary to mention the <i>Wadi r remel </i>(valley or river of sand), and the city of <i>el Baht</i>, which is located in one of the deserts of this country.</blockquote>
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Finally, in the same book, Ibn Fakih merges the <i>baht </i>stone with the story of the City of Brass in a longish account that begins as follows. (At the time this book was written, “al-Andalus” was sometimes used as the name not only for Arab Spain but for Northwest Africa as well.) …<i style="font-weight: bold;"><o:p></o:p></i></div>
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Among the wonders of al-Andalus is al-Baht, which is a city lying in one of its deserts. When the report of this city, and especially of treasures contained in it, had reached Abdu’l-Malik ibn Marwan, he wrote to Musa ibn Nusair, who was his governor in the Maghrib, ordering him to make a journey thither….</blockquote>
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Ibn al-Fakih’s story – and the later “City of Brass” tale in the Arabian Nights– both relate that soldiers who scaled the walls of the city looked inside, laughed loudly, in some cases clapped their hands, and then jumped inside the walls.... These actions suggest the presence of the human magnet stone…<o:p></o:p></div>
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Folklorist Mai I. Gerhardt notes this phenomenon and discusses its further development in <i>The Art of Story-Telling</i> (Leiden: 1963), her impressive literary study of the Arabian Nights…<i style="font-weight: bold;"><o:p></o:p></i></div>
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Both Yakut (d. 1229) and the wonder-loving Kazwini (d. 1283), when copying Ibn el-Fakih’s account, introduce it by the following paragraph:</blockquote>
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<o:p> </o:p>Ibn el-Fakih reports that according to the most ancient authors, the City of Brass was constructed by Dhou el-Qarnein [Alexander the Great], who deposited there his treasures and the products of his science, and prevented entry by some enchantments, which halted visitors. He constructed its interior of the <i>baht</i>stone, which is for men what a magnet is for iron; whoever views it is forced to laugh at the brilliance and hurl themselves towards it: they then cannot detach themselves from it. One finds it in the deserts of Andalusia [ = el-Andalus].<br /><o:p> </o:p> (quoted by Gaudefroy-Demombynes, <i>101 Nuits</i>, p. 333.)</blockquote>
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<o:p> </o:p>And Kazwini complacently adds some more stone-lore: the <i>baht</i>-stone has the colour of white marcassite; a certain little bird, when alighting on it, robs it of its power. – Yakut and Kazwini expressly identify the City of Brass with the city Ibn el-Fakih calls el-Baht; Kazwini specifies that its centre was occupied by a pillar of <i>baht</i>-stone. They keep, on the authority of Ibn el-Fakih, the attribution to Alexander, but at the same time reproduce the inscription speaking of Solomon; and, of course, the episode of the lake. It would seem as if, with these 13<sup>th</sup>-century authors, the legend enters its period of decadence; no attempt is made to sort out conflicting information (as Abu Hamid still tried to do) and the mysterious is replaced and “explained” by the marvellous.<br />
<o:p> </o:p>The progress of this decadence is strikingly attested by the compilers of the next century. The Persian-writing Mustawfi (1340) [also a native of Kazwin, and sometimes designated Kazwini II] who follows Kazwini and an otherwise unknown <i>History of the Maghreb </i>[probably 12<sup>th </sup>century], expressly locates the city in Spain. According to him the expedition of explorers was sent out by one of the Ommayad caliphs of Cordoba, while Musa ibn Nusair, earlier, dispatched fishermen to bring up the Solomonic jars from the lake. He then continues:<br />
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Near the City of Brass, there had been set up two stone tablets on which were inscribed certain details concerning the (future) prophets – peace be upon them all – and mention here was also made of our Prophet – upon whom be peace – and many profitable admonitions and precepts were added thereto. The above account is taken from the <i>History of the Maghreb</i>, and Qazvini [Kazwini] states that the reason why every one at the sight of the City of Brass fell to laughter, was that therein lay a mountain of <i>Bahat</i>(or Laughing) stone. Now the peculiarity of this stone is, that when any man casts his eyes thereon, he falls into convulsions of laughter, and he laughs so violently that he forthwith dies; therefore the demons have great content in the presence there of this stone.<br />
<o:p> </o:p>(Mustawfi, <i>The geographical part of the Nuzhat el-Qulub, transl. cit.,</i>p. 260.)</blockquote>
<o:p> </o:p>The inscribed tablets near the city are a new detail, recalling the seven marble tablets of the Spanish narrator in the ‘1001 Nights’-story. For the rest, Mustawfi’s data are garbled; but he gratefully reproduces Kazwini’s explanatory information on the marvellous stone.<br />
<o:p> </o:p>A few generations later, el-Bakuwi (d. 1403) still relies on Kazwini, as the wording in his paragraph shows:<br />
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<i>Medinat al nehas.</i><i> </i>It is also called <i>Medinat al Saphar</i>(the City of Brass); it is famous: it is said that it was built by Dhoulcarnain, who deposited his treasures there with talismans to keep them untouched. In the interior there is a baht stone, which is <i>the magnet for men</i>; it is called such because if a man approaches too close, he is drawn to it and attached to it like iron to a magnet; he cannot free himself and he dies; this magnet is found in the deserts of Andalusia.<br />
<o:p> </o:p>The circuit of this city is some forty parasangs, the height of its walls five hundred cubits; it has no gates, its foundations are impregnable; what is more certain is that it was built by Solomon, son of David. Musa ibn Nasr, lieutenant of Abdol-malik, made his army approach it, and set up a ladder with which he reached the top of its walls, and he sent a man inside who never came back; he [Musa] entered also, and never returned; (but we leave there all the fables that are produced on this city). [The bracketed sentence at the end is due to the translator, who makes a point of suppressing the “fables” of his original. It is a pity to be thus deprived of whatever information the – very mediocre – el-Bakuwi still had to offer.]<br />
<o:p> </o:p> <span lang="ES">(El-Bakoui, <i>Exposition…; transl. cit., </i>p. 524.)<br /><o:p></o:p></span></blockquote>
<span lang="ES"><o:p></o:p></span><span lang="ES"> </span>As far as can be ascertained from the abridged and condensed eighteenth-century translation, this account seems to represent a shrivelled state of the legend. The familiar details, and notably also the <i>baht</i>-stone, are still there, but the whole is by way of losing whatever consistency it used to possess. Alexander and Solomon are mentioned, as builders of the city, almost in the same breath; the statement that Musa himself entered the city and never returned [I wonder if the translation is correct here] is preposterous, seeing that his whole career has come down in history.</blockquote>
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[Source: Gerhardt, Mia I. <i>The Art of Story-Telling: A Literary Study of the Thousand and One Nights.</i>Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1963.]<o:p></o:p></div>
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Robert Leblinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08265093977381441210noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686840318808961364.post-46642094872975115952013-07-20T07:49:00.000-07:002013-07-20T07:49:17.234-07:00Heat Death Warriors: The Battle Against Entropy<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<!--StartFragment-->
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHwi0EbrRk828m8TO11xK8CPuBgANG_D8HQ8bUnW9lqANBPprfvBJNF9pZxtyI5jvhvAZ6G8DVPS1RbVCgDc30mHCQJY4eM7oLd4J1tgo-v7T8plEsIdfk9UI6Gcb-ipVx1oksjrttcB4/s1600/Ilc_9yr_moll4096.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHwi0EbrRk828m8TO11xK8CPuBgANG_D8HQ8bUnW9lqANBPprfvBJNF9pZxtyI5jvhvAZ6G8DVPS1RbVCgDc30mHCQJY4eM7oLd4J1tgo-v7T8plEsIdfk9UI6Gcb-ipVx1oksjrttcB4/s320/Ilc_9yr_moll4096.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-variant: small-caps;">The universe</span>
tends to wind down.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As they
taught us in high school science class, everything slowly – or sometimes quickly
– deteriorates. Energy is lost, either suddenly or gradually. Heat seeps away. Stars burn out. Complex systems
collapse. This is the physical process we call <i><a href="http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/therm/entrop.html#e3">entropy</a></i>. Thermal equilibrium is the goal of the universe.<o:p></o:p></div>
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There seem
to be only two things that work against entropy. One is the Big Bang, which
happened almost 14 billion years ago. Whatever caused the start of our
universe, it created processes that led to complexity and molecules and galactic
systems and everything else that makes up the universe. The Big Bang,
mysterious as it was, challenged thermal equilibrium.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The second
opponent of entropy is life – just as mysterious as the Big Bang – which began
some four billion years ago and which is ongoing. Living organisms store energy
and fight the tendency toward collapse, breakdown, rot, disorder. These
organisms do die, but they create successors, offspring, which carry on the
struggle against entropy. Life creates systems that challenge the tendency of
the universe.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What does
all this mean? Simply, that we human beings, as living organisms, are
engineered, designed, created, to fight entropy. There may be other reasons why
we exist, but fighting entropy is self-evident and clearly our most important
priority – for if we fail to stave off <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe">heat death</a></i> (the end of thermodynamic free energy) we are finished.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It is not
certain that humans or any other living species can win the battle against
entropy. In fact, it is very likely that the struggle is unwinnable in the long
run. But it is in our nature as a species to fight against our own deaths and against
the heat death of the universe. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It may be
that in time – perhaps billions of years from now – we will figure out a way to
outwit the laws of thermodynamics, keep energy pulsing, and become literal
masters of the universe. We’re a long way from that outcome, but we will doubtless
continue to pursue it.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<!--EndFragment--></div>
Robert Leblinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08265093977381441210noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686840318808961364.post-43132277592669605582012-11-07T20:10:00.000-08:002012-11-08T05:29:26.527-08:00When the World Shook<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhK226g2U6QlY_7oUc4t06eKXD_tzdPxuv0g1I4sCR7h3PwuNVjnXAYhzbpJAd6uRicdUC5bHZYcdHgq5AnRRxfkrZckvVt7hAOf5cukmjfgQxdSWVj2eD8slT1ICG4Ovh1rNnACOnTYu8/s1600/WhenTheWorldShook.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhK226g2U6QlY_7oUc4t06eKXD_tzdPxuv0g1I4sCR7h3PwuNVjnXAYhzbpJAd6uRicdUC5bHZYcdHgq5AnRRxfkrZckvVt7hAOf5cukmjfgQxdSWVj2eD8slT1ICG4Ovh1rNnACOnTYu8/s320/WhenTheWorldShook.jpg" width="272" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>When the World Shook</i>
by H. Rider Haggard is an unusual if flawed piece of early science fiction,
laced with philosophy, religion, colonial anthropology, romance and humor. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The journal <i>Science Fiction Studies </i>of DePauw University <a href="http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/16/mullen16bib.htm">sums up</a> the
book as follows:</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>When The World Shook:
Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley, and Arbuthnot.</i>
1919. The most science-fictional of Haggard's novels, for along with such
psychic phenomena as metempsychosis we have suspended animation with survivors
from a technologically advanced civilization 250,000 years in the past, a chart
comparing the star patterns of that time with those of today, and a monstrous
machine — one capable of changing the tilt of the earth.</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">It is a post-Victorian novel, written during World War I,
and the conflict impinges upon the narrative in various ways. <i>When the World Shook</i> was first published
in serial form in the British Christian evangelical magazine <i>The Quiver</i> in 1918, at the end of the
war, and was released as a novel the following year.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">A thoughtful blogger was right on target when he recently <a href="http://elijahkinchspector.wordpress.com/2012/10/25/when-the-world-shook/">observed</a>:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>When the World Shook</i>
is a beautiful and silly book. It has very clear flaws and is definitely not
one of the best books ever written, but it may turn out to be one of my
favorites. This thing is deeply flawed, but I fully intend to read it again and
again throughout my life.</span><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;">The book is, at its core, the adventures of a troubled
agnostic and his buddies the atheist and the believer, as they explore a
mysterious island and meet the powerful man-god-king asleep in its bowels. They
also argue philosophy and theology a lot. Oh and there’s World War I? Plus a
touch of racism, but not as much as I expected! Basically, it’s your normal
“boy widower who suffers anxiety about where we go when we die and what our
place in the universe might be meets girl who is an ancient scientifimagical
princess who has slept in the Earth for eons and might be a reincarnation of
someone who lived during her sleep” story.</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The author, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._Rider_Haggard">Sir Henry Rider Haggard</a>,
wrote adventure novels set in exotic locations, predominantly Africa – such as <i>King Solomon’s Mines</i> (1885), <i>Allan Quatermain</i> (1887) and <i>She</i> (1887) – and was a pioneer of the “lost
world” literary genre, of which <i>When the
World Shook</i> is a late example.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Haggard was a close friend of Rudyard Kipling, and Sir
Henry’s biographer Morton Cohen <a href="http://www.trussel.com/prehist/pringle.htm">says</a> Kipling provided the
idea for <i>When the World Shook</i>. The
website <a href="http://hilobrow.com/2012/10/16/when-the-world-shook/">HiLoBrow</a>
says Kipling “helped with the plot.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">HiLoBrow has posted a modern <a href="http://hilobrow.com/tag/world-shook/">serialization</a> of the novel,
with some minor abridgements. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Here is HiLoBrow’s plot summary plus some interesting
blurbs, old and new:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>When the World Shook </i>concerns
adventurers Bastin, Bickley, and Arbuthnot, who discover two Atlanteans in a
state of suspended animation on a remote island. One of the awakened sleepers,
Lord Oro, is a superman — the last king of the Sons of Wisdom, who’d relied on
hyper-advanced technology to subjugate the planet’s lesser peoples. The other
is Oro’s sexy daughter, Yva… who falls in love with Arbuthnot. Using astral
projection, Lord Oro visits London and the battlefields of the Western Front.
Why? To determine whether or not he should once again employ an infernal
chthonic machine to drown the worthless human race, as he’d done 250,000 years
earlier!...</span><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">“A really splendid romance, rich in color, fresh and
gorgeous in its imaginative qualities and power, and needless to add,
absorbingly interesting, is this wherein Rider Haggard tells us of what
happened ‘When the World Shook.’” — <i>The
New York Times </i>(1919)</span><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">“Speaking quite soberly and without exaggeration, this story
of ‘When the World Shook’ is an amazing novel. Amazing in its imaginative
quality, its romance, the splendor of its descriptions, doubly amazing when one
remembers that it is the successor to a long series of colorful tales of
adventure in savage or extraordinary lands… We frankly admit that, in our
opinion at least, Rider Haggard has never conceived and placed before our eyes
any pictures more thrilling or more impressive that are contained in this
latest book.” — <i>New York Evening Post</i>
(1919)</span><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">“Rider Haggard has again unbridled his splendid imagination.
A thrilling, gigantic wonder tale.” — <i>Pittsburgh
Sun</i> (1919)</span><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">“If this is pulp fiction it’s high pulp: a Wagnerian opera
of an adventure tale, a B-movie humanist apocalypse and chivalric romance. When
the World Shook has it all — English gentlemen of leisure, a devastating
shipwreck, a volcanic tropical island inhabited by cannibals, an ancient
princess risen from the grave, and if that weren’t enough a friendly, ongoing
debate between a godless materialist and a devout Christian. H. Rider Haggard’s
rich universe is both profoundly camp and deeply idealistic.” — Lydia Millet
(2012 blurb for HiLoBooks)</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://freeread.com.au/@RGLibrary/HRiderHaggard/Novels/WhenTheWorldShook.html">Another
online version</a> of the novel is available on an Australian website,
freeread.com.au.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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Robert Leblinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08265093977381441210noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686840318808961364.post-41693091346136136902012-11-01T10:16:00.001-07:002012-11-01T11:21:53.197-07:00Queens of Mesopotamia – Part II: Nitocris<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="text-align: left;">
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‘Darius Opens the Tomb of Nitocris’<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
By Eustache Le Sueur<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">In the previous post, we discussed the Assyrian queen
Semiramis, as described in the <i>Histories</i>
of Herodotus and other works. Now we will take a look at Nitocris, another queen
who ruled Babylon five generations after Semiramis.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">(Another, perhaps better-known, Nitocris was also mentioned
by Herodotus as a ruler of Egypt. She was said to be the last pharaoh of the
Sixth dynasty. Today, scholars question her very existence.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The Assyrian-origin Nitocris, sometimes called Nitocris of
Babylon, is said to be either the wife or daughter of Nebuchadnezzar II. This
Nebuchadnezzar (a major figure in the Bible’s Book of Daniel) was the son of
Nabopolassar, founder of the Neo-Babylonian or Chaldean Empire, which broke
free from Nineveh-based Assyria by forming an alliance with the Medes of Persia.
After the destruction of Nineveh, the Babylonians began to worry about the
ambitions of their erstwhile Persian allies.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Nitocris is introduced by Herodotus as <a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Herodotus/history.mb.txt">follows</a> (in George
Rawlinson’s translation):<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The later of the two queens, whose name was Nitocris, a
wiser princess than her predecessor, not only left behind her, as memorials of
her occupancy of the throne, the works which I shall presently describe, but
also, observing the great power and restless enterprise of the Medes, who had
taken so large a number of cities, and among them Nineveh, and expecting to be
attacked in her turn, made all possible exertions to increase the defences of
her empire.</span></blockquote>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Herodotus says Nitocris ordered a number of grand civil
works aimed at creating defensive positions north of Babylon and thereby
deterring attacks by the Medes. Among other things, Babylonian excavations
transformed the Euphrates, formerly a straight river course flowing into
Babylon from the north, turning it into a winding river with a number of sharp
bends. She also ordered a huge lake to be dug to the north of her capital.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">As Herodotus put it: “All these works were on that side of
Babylon where the passes lay, and the roads into Media were the straightest,
and the aim of the queen in making them was to prevent the Medes from holding
intercourse with the Babylonians, and so to keep them in ignorance of her
affairs.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">She also took advantage of the massive construction projects
to temporarily redirect the Euphrates into the new lake basin and build a stone
bridge across the riverbed inside the city of Babylon, for the first time
linking the two sides of the capital.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Says Herodotus: “When the river had filled the cutting, and
the bridge was finished, the Euphrates was turned back again into its ancient
bed; and thus the basin, transformed suddenly into a lake, was seen to answer
the purpose for which it was made, and the inhabitants, by help of the basin,
obtained the advantage of a bridge.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The location of the <a href="http://visopsys.org/andy/essays/herodotus-babylon.html">bridge of
Nitocris</a> has been uncovered by archaeologists at the site of the city of
Babylon.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The Achaemenid Persian King Cyrus used Nitocris’ public
works against her in his conquest of Babylon. He diverted the Euphrates into
her artificial lake, lowering the river’s level to allow his troops to enter
the city under the defensive walls beneath which the river passed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Nitocris also created what Herodotus called “a remarkable
deception” to prevent anyone from seizing her burial treasure after her death.
She built her tomb above one of the main gates of Babylon, rendering the
entrance unusable, because of a widespread cultural prohibition against passing
beneath a dead body:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">She had her tomb constructed in the upper part of one of the
principal gateways of the city, high above the heads of the passers by, with
this inscription cut upon it:- "If there be one among my successors on the
throne of Babylon who is in want of treasure, let him open my tomb, and take as
much as he chooses -- not, however, unless he be truly in want, for it will not
be for his good." This tomb continued untouched until [the Achaemenid
Persian king] Darius came to the kingdom. To him it seemed a monstrous thing
that he should be unable to use one of the gates of the town, and that a sum of
money should be lying idle, and moreover inviting his grasp, and he not seize
upon it. Now he could not use the gate, because, as he drove through, the dead
body would have been over his head. Accordingly he opened the tomb; but instead
of money, found only the dead body, and a writing which said- "Hadst thou
not been insatiate of pelf, and careless how thou gottest it, thou wouldst not
have broken open the sepulchres of the dead."</span></blockquote>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Herodotus does not specifically say what happened to
Nitocris’ treasure, but his account suggests none was buried with her – that,
of course, would have been the centerpiece of the deception.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Classicist Deborah Levine Gera, author of <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=Fbm0nGoZo58C&pg=PA111&lpg=PA111&dq=nitocris+of+babylon&source=bl&ots=EZCRCJFh-V&sig=2b1fEm17syRrdtX9xtzxHa_6Uvw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=iJuSULbPI5LD0AHe8oHYDQ&ved=0CDcQ6AEwBTgU#v=onepage&q=nitocris%20of%20babylon&f=false">Warrior
Women: The Anonymous Tractatus De Mulieribus</a>, says Nitocris of Babylon
appears to be more intelligent than Semiramis, particularly because of her
public works projects and her awareness of Median expansionism. But she notes
that some scholars suspect the two queens, if they actually existed, were in
fact the same person. Plutarch, for example confuses the two, and has Darius
plunder Semiramis’ tomb. Also some accounts attribute the bridge-building and
artificial lake to Semiramis.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">There are other theories about Nitocris’ identity, including:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">(1) She was Nebuchadnezzar II, whose name Herodotus mistook
for a feminine form.</span><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">(2) She was Adad-Guppi, mother of Nabonidus, last of the
Neo-Babylonian rulers. The influential Adad-Guppi, who helped engineer her
son’s rise to the throne, was born in about 649 B.C., 150 years or five
generations after the queen thought to be Semiramis.</span><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">(3) Nitocris was a powerful Assyrian queen named Naqi’a,
wife of Sennacherib (who ruled from 704-681 B.C.) and mother of Esarhaddon (who
ruled from 680-669 B.C.). Many of the public works completed during Naqi’a’s
lifetime resembled those of Nitocris.</span></blockquote>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">To sum up, as Levine Gera puts it:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Nitocris is an elusive figure. All of the attempts to
identify the Babylonian queen with an historical personage lead to difficulties
of one kind or another and we cannot establish whether, in fact, she ever
existed. Real or not, Nitocris is a complex, ambiguous personality whose
successes and failures are inextricably linked.
She builds magnificent, monumental waterworks, but these are used by Cyrus
to capture her city. She tricks Darius into opening her tomb only to bring
about the violation of her own grave. Nitocris is said to be clever, but the
queen is, in Herodotus’ tale, her own worst enemy: ultimately, her building
feats and artful epitaph – the outstanding products of her intelligence – do
her no good.</span></blockquote>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The mystery of Nitocris, like that of Semiramis, continues….<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<!--EndFragment--></div>
Robert Leblinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08265093977381441210noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686840318808961364.post-49177521792942259732012-10-26T13:17:00.000-07:002012-10-27T06:17:39.707-07:00Queens of Mesopotamia – Part I: Semiramis<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMpmKYS-P1ekHmkUvK40B5RvmqrbSzjrBXY856qCUP-TOpn994ft_Rx1kbxxBV_nONprPimLOgjqGTAVZAdkelD8G6w-iKuHiZX1qABXbrBqfhkFfVPTz7pqDwRwxuxSgUYdUEX2VxxZU/s1600/Semiramis-Regina.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMpmKYS-P1ekHmkUvK40B5RvmqrbSzjrBXY856qCUP-TOpn994ft_Rx1kbxxBV_nONprPimLOgjqGTAVZAdkelD8G6w-iKuHiZX1qABXbrBqfhkFfVPTz7pqDwRwxuxSgUYdUEX2VxxZU/s320/Semiramis-Regina.png" width="263" /></a></div>
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In his <i>Histories</i>,
Herodotus discusses two famous Assyrian women who ruled ancient Babylon (among many
other cities in the Neo-Assyrian Empire): Semiramis and Nitocris. Our
historical knowledge of these leaders is scant, but there are plenty of
colorful legends. We will first take a look at Semiramis, and consider Nitocris
in a later post.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Herodotus <a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Herodotus/history.1.i.html">says</a> of
Semiramis:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Many sovereigns have ruled over this city of Babylon, and
lent their aid to the building of its walls and the adornment of its temples,
of whom I shall make mention in my Assyrian history. Among them were two women.
Of these, the earlier, called Semiramis, held the throne five generations
before the later princess. She raised certain embankments well worthy of
inspection, in the plain near Babylon, to control the [Euphrates] river, which,
till then, used to overflow, and flood the whole country round about.</blockquote>
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George Rawlinson, translator of the above lines, says in a
footnote that Semiramis was the wife of Rammannirari III (812-783 B.C.) and
that she may have introduced the worship of Nebo (or Nabu), the
Assyrian-Babylonian god of wisdom and writing, into the great northern Assyrian
city of Nineveh, near modern-day Mosul in Iraq. He pointedly adds: “Herodotus
gives none of the wild tales attached to the mythical Semiramis.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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Historians today believe Semiramis (or Shammuramat) was the
wife and queen of Assyrian King Shamsi-Adad IV, who ruled from 824-811 B.C. Semiramis
is said to have ruled on her own as regent for four years from the death of her
husband until her son Adad-nirari III came of age. Scholars question whether Semiramis was
formally named regent during this period, but there is no doubt she was an
influential force in the Neo-Assyrian Empire of the day.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Diodorus Siculus and other historians who related the
legends surrounding Semiramis apparently drew much of their information from the
accounts of Ctesias of Cnidus.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiramis">Here</a> is
one description of the legends, which notes that Semiramis was believed to be
the daughter of a fish-goddess and that she eventually became the wife of a
mythical Assyrian king named Ninus:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
According to the legend as related by Diodorus, Semiramis
was of noble parents, the daughter of the fish-goddess Derketo of Ascalon in
Syria and a mortal. Derketo abandoned her at birth and drowned herself. The
child was fed by doves until she was found and brought up by Simmas, the royal shepherd.<br />
<o:p> </o:p>Afterwards she married Onnes or Menones, one of the generals
of Ninus. Ninus was so struck by her bravery at the capture of Bactra that he
married her, forcing Onnes to commit suicide.<br />
<o:p> </o:p>She and Ninus had a son named Ninyas. After King Ninus
conquered Asia, including the Bactrians, he was fatally wounded by an arrow.
Semiramis then masqueraded as her son and tricked her late husband's army into
following her instructions because they thought these came from their new
ruler. After Ninus's death she reigned as queen regnant, conquering much of
Asia.<br />
<o:p> </o:p>Not only was she able to reign effectively, she also added
Ethiopia to the empire. She restored ancient Babylon and protected it with a
high brick wall that completely surrounded the city. She is also credited with
inventing the chastity belt. Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus credits her
as the first person to castrate a male youth into eunuch-hood: "Semiramis,
that ancient queen who was the first person to castrate male youths of tender
age" (Lib. XIV).</blockquote>
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Edwin Murphy, translator of Diodorus Siculus, <a href="http://george-foryan.com/content/siculus_semiramis.pdf">says</a> of
Semiramis:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It is probable that Semiramis was originally a Semi-Divine
Syrian Empress, (part goddess part-human), perhaps the same who was linked to
the [deity] worshipped at Ascalon under the name of Astarte, or the Oriental Aphrodite,
associated with the Babylonia Ishtar, from the Sumerian Innana, the Persian
Anaitis, and the Armenian Saris to whom the dove was sacred. Hence the stories
of her voluptuousness which were current even in the time of Augustus. The
historical figure behind this legendary queen is to be identified with, and
almost certain, the real Queen "Sammura-mat", the palace wife of
Shamsi-Adad V, king of Assyria, and mother of King Adad-Nirari III; she lived
towards the end of the ninth century (regent to 810-805 B.C.), and is known to
us from ancient Assyrian inscriptions. Numerous operas, plays, and novels are
still current that celebrate the fame of this greatest of queens
"Semiramis"... who never really lived.</blockquote>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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Murphy explores even further the legend that Semiramis was
the daughter of a fish-goddess (mermaid?), a concept also discussed by Lucian
in his <i>De Dea Syria</i>:<o:p></o:p></div>
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Diodorus has preserved the traces of some authentic Semitic
religious lore. Ascalon was the site of a famous temple to the goddess
Atargatis, or Adargatis, of whose name Derceto is a variant. Atargatis herself
was a combination of two deities: Athtar (contracted to Atar, an Aramaic form
of Phoenician Astarte, Babylonian Ishtar, Old Testament Astoreth); and Athe, a
Palmyrene divinity. The Talmudic and Armenian rendition, Tar'atha, shows this
duality quite well. The worship of Atargatis was a goddess of increase and
fertility, sometimes identified by Greek writers with Hellenic Aphrodite. She
was linked with the ideas of the life-giving power of water and the fertility
of fish, and associated, at least in Palestine, with the male deity Dagon, who
was also represented as part fish, reminiscent of Oannes, the enigmatic
amphibious culture-bringer of the Chaldaeans.<br />
<o:p> </o:p>Many Syrians reverence fish and observed taboos on eating
them. Lucian, in the second century A.D., described the practice at Hieropolis
in northern Syria, the other great center of Derceto worship: "Others
think that Semiramis ... founded this site, not for Hera, but for her own
mother ... Derceto. There was a likeness of Derceto in Phoenicia, a strange
sight! It is a woman for half of her length, but from the thighs to the tip of
the feet a fish's tail stretches out. The Derceto in Hieropolis, however, is
entirely a woman... They consider fish sacred and never touch one... There is
also a lake not far from the sanctuary, in which sacred fish of all kinds are
raised" (De Dea Syria 14,15). A fragment of Mnaseas adds: "Whenever
they pray to the goddess, they offer fishes made of silver and gold; each day
the priests offer her real fish, delicately cooked, on a table". Many
classical authors mention the Syrians' abstention from fish, and connect this
in various ways with Atargatis, whom some rationalized simply as a cruel queen
of ancient Syria who instituted this practice.</blockquote>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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Interestingly, Murphy finds a possible connection between
Onnes, husband of Semiramis, and Oannes, the part-man part-fish creature who according
to ancient legend emerged from the Persian/Arabian Gulf and brought knowledge and culture to ancient
Mesopotamia:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It is possible that Onnes represents, in a disguised and
attenuated form, Oannes, the semi-human fish-like being who, according to the
Babylonian History of Berosus, brought culture to ancient Mesopotamia. Oannes
was Berosus' name for the Babylonian god Ea (equivalent to Sumerian En-ki). His
widespread cult was adopted by the Assyrians, among others, who erected a
temple to him at Nineveh. Ea's special domain was water and the deep, and this
plus his icthyomorphic appearance and his worship at Nineveh may reflect a
flimsy connection with the Semiramis legend through the fish-goddess Derceto,
her mother. But the point should not be pressed too far, the evidence is only
inferential. The slight resemblance between the name Derceto and that of
Damkina, Ea's consort, may be coincidental. But it is curious that Hydaspes,
mentioned below as a son of Onnes, bears the same name as a river in India: for
Ea was of the deep or abyss, the source of all streams.</blockquote>
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Thus, as we often find, legends and myths about historical
figures frequently have more importance than the so-called factual data. We
find Semiramis has connections to the great goddess of the Middle East and to the
mysterious knowledge-bringer of early Mesopotamia. As a mythic and metaphoric
figure, she has survived to the present day, has been featured in numerous
plays and works of literature, including Dante’s <i>Inferno</i> and the Snopes trilogy of William Faulkner.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Robert Leblinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08265093977381441210noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686840318808961364.post-91156552862920343632012-08-12T13:32:00.002-07:002012-08-13T06:00:02.000-07:00The Manticore<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtYuj_HpoW377HRDoK0Emv9jLMoTsHs8J8vPcbVtEktsPVEAUqdKorbWlpVXlJGEJWLbK130e4A72UYvrmKzDgawioiCrKHk-yrtnt68sgCFcLiwwz_awX36yfBiozSwYyBur1XFs-cys/s1600/Manticore+from+medieval+manuscript.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="317" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtYuj_HpoW377HRDoK0Emv9jLMoTsHs8J8vPcbVtEktsPVEAUqdKorbWlpVXlJGEJWLbK130e4A72UYvrmKzDgawioiCrKHk-yrtnt68sgCFcLiwwz_awX36yfBiozSwYyBur1XFs-cys/s320/Manticore+from+medieval+manuscript.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The martikhora(s) or manticore is a mythical animal described in the <i>Indica</i> of Ctesias of Cnidus and a few other
classical sources. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The creature is said to derive its name from the Persian
words for “man-eater.” It lives in the forests of India, has a lion-like body
and a human face, and a tail that shoots lethal, meter-long stingers. It is
also said to be able to mimic human speech. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Some believe the martikhora is an
exaggerated description of a man-eating Bengal tiger, which was hunted in early
India in the same manner as Ctesias attributes to martikhoras. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The people of
Spain integrated the manticore into their mythology and transformed the creature
into a child-snatching werewolf. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder describes
the manticore as living in Ethiopia, but he also quotes Ctesias, who said the
beast was found in India. Ethiopia and India were often confused in ancient
accounts. Here is what <a href="http://www.livius.org/ct-cz/ctesias/photius_indica.html">Ctesias</a> had to say about the creature:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>[§15] </b>The <i>martikhora</i> is an animal found in
this country. It has a face like a man's, a skin red as cinnabar, and is as
large as a lion. It has three rows of teeth, ears and light-blue eyes like
those of a man; its tail is like that of a land scorpion, containing a sting
more than a cubit long at the end. It has other stings on each side of its tail
and one on the top of its head, like the scorpion, with which it inflicts a
wound that is always fatal. If it is attacked from a distance, it sets up its
tail in front and discharges its stings as if from a bow; if attacked from
behind, it straightens it out and launches its stings in a direct line to the
distance of a thirty meter. The wound inflicted is fatal to all animals except
the elephant. The stings are about a foot long and about as thick as a small
rush. The martikhora is called in Greek <i>anthropophagos </i>[man-eater],
because, although it preys upon other animals, it kills and devours a greater
number of human beings. It fights with both its claws and stings, which,
according to Ctesias, grow again after they have been discharged. There is a
great number of these animals in India, which are hunted and killed with spears
or arrows by natives mounted on elephants.</span></blockquote>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.theoi.com/Thaumasios/Mantikhoras.html">Aelian</a>, a Greek military writer who lived in second-century Rome, has a similar account of the manticore, based on Ctesias but with more details:</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There is in India a wild beast, powerful, daring, as
big as the largest lion, of a red colour like cinnabar, shaggy like a dog, and
in the language of India it is called Martikhoras (Manticore) [Persian
mardkhora ‘man-slayer’]. Its face however is not that of a wild beast but of a
man, and it has three rows of teeth set in its upper jaw and three in the
lower; these are exceedingly sharp and larger than the fangs of a hound. Its
ears also resemble a man's except that they are larger and shaggy; its eyes are
blue-grey and they too are like a man's, but its feet and claws, you must know,
are those of a lion. To the end of its tail is attached the sting of a
scorpion, and this might be over a cubit in length; and the tail has stings at
intervals on either side. But the tip of the tail gives a fatal sting to anyone
who encounters it, and death is immediate. If one pursued the beast it lets fly
its stings, like arrows, sideways, and it can shoot a great distance; and when
it discharges its stings straight ahead it bends bends its tail back; if
however it shoots in a backward direction, as the Sakai (Sacae) do, then it
stretches its tail to its full extent. Any creature that the missile hits it
kills; the elephant alone it does not kill. These stings which it shoots are a
foot long and the thickness of a bulrush. Now Ktesias asserts (and he says that
the Indians confirm his words) that in the places where those stings have been
let fly others spring up, so that this evil produces a crop. And according to
the same writer the Martikhoras for a choice devours human beings; indeed it
will slaughter a great number; and it lies in wait not for a single man but
would set upon two or even three men, and alone overcomes even that number. All
other animals it defeats: the lion alone it can never bring down. That this
creature takes special delight in gorging human flesh its very name testifies,
for in the Greek language its means androphagos (man-eater), and its name is
derived from its activities. Like the stag it is extremely swift.</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Now the Indians hunt the young of these animals while they
are still without stings in their tails, which they then crush with a stone to
prevent them from growing stings. The sound of their voice is as near as
possible that of a trumpet.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Ktesias (Ctesias) declares that he has actually seen this
animal in Persia (it had been brought from India as a present to the Persian
King)--if Ktesias is to be regarded as a sufficient authority on such matters.
At any rate after hearing of the peculiarities of this animal, one must pay
heed to the historian of Knidos.</span></blockquote>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A mythical creatures <a href="http://www.mythicalcreatureslist.com/mythical-creature/Martikhora">website</a> offers a few more details:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Most commonly known as Manticore, this beast comes from the
forests of India. It has the body of a lion, the face of a man with three rows
of teeth and a notorious scorpion tail. Its tail is lined with poisonous stings
that it throws at its victims immediately. It shoots by facing away from its
enemy and flicking its tail backwards. The stings are one meter in length and
are poisonous to all except the elephant. It creates newborn Manticores from
the ground producing them quickly. Hunters kill the young of the Manticore
before they grow their poisonous tail and crush its tails with a stone to
prevent that from happening. The Manticore makes a sound like a trumpet and is
vermilion red in colour.</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Manticore was detailed by Pliny the Elder from ancient
Greece in his book <i>Historia Naturalis</i>
(77 AD) which derived from a description from King Artaxerxes Mnemon (404 – 359
BC). The Manticore also featured in medieval bestiaries and art. It has the
Biblical connection as being the representative creature for the prophet
Jeremiah. In Churches it is seen as a scaled covered woman. Later in Spanish folklore, the Manticore developed into a child-stealing Werewolf. </span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> All in all, a wondrous creature....</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
Robert Leblinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08265093977381441210noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686840318808961364.post-11825445858908902372012-06-09T19:25:00.003-07:002017-06-10T00:54:36.138-07:00Biche-de-Mer<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinCJ5nX3kvCNYokFUvUqevMt5MAdE_2fSRMtFKMiGWZU9qRL0zstD9lBBzpAdZmwk0KhexKKmF2aS6mJ10QgQ4V4AQsIaip1cjPIbNbFTVL4-WLZu_blnCfdXMxHGQ2d_30KK4zRJ1rNw/s1600/800px-Espardenya_(animal).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinCJ5nX3kvCNYokFUvUqevMt5MAdE_2fSRMtFKMiGWZU9qRL0zstD9lBBzpAdZmwk0KhexKKmF2aS6mJ10QgQ4V4AQsIaip1cjPIbNbFTVL4-WLZu_blnCfdXMxHGQ2d_30KK4zRJ1rNw/s320/800px-Espardenya_(animal).jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">While reading Edgar Allan Poe’s rather
remarkable short novel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Narrative of
Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket</i> (1838), I was struck by a bit of natural
history involving a sea creature called “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">biche-de-mer</i>.”
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">At this point in the narrative, Pym has
become a crewman on a British sailing schooner called the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jane Guy</i>, bound for the South Seas on a trading and sealing
mission. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The captain decides to explore south of the
Antarctic Circle, and they discover a strange island inhabited by a
dark-skinned race. They decide to work with the islanders to harvest <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">biche-de-mer</i> from the shallow coastal
waters, for eventual sale to the Chinese and others.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">About six years before Poe’s novel appeared,
American sea captain Benjamin Morrell had published an ostensibly true account of
his nautical adventures entitled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Narrative
of Four Voyages</i> (1832) in which he talks about the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">biche-de-mer</i>. <a href="http://www.antipodean.com/cgi-bin/antipodean/15630">Morrell</a> describes
the creature as “an edible sea-slug” much in demand by the Chinese:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">"Some of them are as much as a foot and
a half long. The Chinese eat them, and think them a great luxury" (p97)</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Poe is <a href="http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7EMA98/silverman/poe/frame.html">said</a> to
have borrowed extensively from Morrell’s account, though changing things
significantly to suit his purposes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><a href="http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA98/silverman/poe/mor_demer.html">Here</a>
is some of what Arthur Gordon Pym says about the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">biche-de-mer</i>:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">This mollusca is oblong, and of different
sizes, from three to eighteen inches in length; and I have seen a few that were
not less than two feet long. They are nearly round, a little flattish on one
side, which lies next the ground, or bottom of the sea; and they are from one
inch to eight inches thick. They crawl up into shallow water at particular
seasons of the year, probably for the purpose of gendering, as we often find
them in pairs. It is when the sun has the most power upon the water, rendering
it tepid, that they approach the shore; and often into places so shallow, that
on the tide's receding they are left dry on the coral reef, exposed to the heat
of the sun. But they do not bring forth their young in shallow water, as we
never see any of their progeny; and the full-grown ones are always seen coming
in from deep water. They feed
principally on that class of zoophytes which produce the coral.</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">biche-de-mer</i>
is generally taken in three or four feet water; after which they are taken to
the shore, where they are split at one end with a knife, the incision being one
inch or more, according to the size of the mollusca. Through this opening the
entrails are forced out by pressure, and they are much like those of any other
small tenant of the deep. The article is then washed, and afterward boiled to a
certain degree, which must not be too much nor too little. They are then buried
in the ground for four hours; then boiled again for a short time, after which
they are dried, either by the fire or the sun. Those cured by the sun are worth
the most; but where one picul (133 1/3lb.) can be cured that way, I can cure
thirty picul by the fire. When once properly cured, they can be kept, in a dry
place, for two or three years, without any risk; but they should be examined
once every few months, say four times a year, to see if any dampness is likely
to affect them. A picul, according to the Chinese weight, is 133 1/3, lb.
avoirdupois.</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">The Chinese, as before stated, consider <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">biche-de-mer</i> a very great luxury;
believing that it wonderfully strengthens and nourishes the system, and renews
the exhausted vigour of the immoderate voluptuary. The first quality commands a
high price in Canton, being worth ninety dollars a picul….</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The creature Pym is describing is of course
the sea cucumber, which was often called the “sea slug” in the 18<sup>th</sup>
and early 19<sup>th</sup> centuries. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">As our friends at Wikipedia <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_cucumber">tell</a> us:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Sea cucumbers are echinoderms from the class
Holothuroidea. They are marine animals with a leathery skin and an elongated
body containing a single, branched gonad. Sea cucumbers are found on the sea
floor worldwide. The number of holothurian species worldwide is about 1250 with
the greatest number being in the Asia Pacific region. Many of these are gathered
for human consumption and some species are cultivated in aquaculture systems.
The harvested product is variously referred to as trepang, bêche-de-mer or
balate. Sea cucumbers serve a useful purpose in the marine ecosystem as they
help recycle nutrients, breaking down detritus and other organic matter after
which bacteria can continue the degradation process…. </span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">In recent years, the sea cucumber industry in
Alaska has increased due to increased export of the skins and muscles to China.</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">
</span><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">In China, sea cucumbers are farmed
commercially in artificial ponds. These ponds can be as large as 1,000 acres
(400 ha), and satisfy much of the local demand. Wild sea cucumbers are caught
by divers and these wild Alaskan sea cucumbers have higher nutritional value
and are larger than farmed Chinese sea cucumbers. Larger size and higher
nutritional value has allowed the Alaskan fisheries to continue to compete for
market share, despite the increase in local, Chinese sea cucumber farming.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Interestingly, a controversy has developed in
Canada over a plan to begin sea cucumber farming in Baynes Sound, between
Denman and Vancouver Islands on the Pacific coast. Baynes Sound is a popular
recreation area, and local residents are worried that sea cucumber farming will
lead to industrialization of the area.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Says one <a href="http://www.canada.com/Concern+questions+about+cucumber+farming+proposal+Baynes+Sound/6712186/story.html">press
account</a> dated June 1:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">A proposed underwater sea cucumber farm that
will stretch for five kilometers along the shore of Baynes Sound has opponents
raising the alarm and mobilizing to stop the application before it is approved,
but they have only one month to do so….</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">If tenure is granted, it means the applicants
Dan Bowen and Eric Gant will be past the first and arguably biggest hurdle in
gaining a license to seed and harvest the sea creatures, considered a delicacy
in parts of Asia, for the next 10-30 years….</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Bowen said that the cultivation of sea
cucumbers, which live in the permanently submerged subtidal zone, will not
impact residents or recreational users. The animals grow below the surface,
somewhere between two to 20 metres under water, and they are seeded and
harvested by divers. During their first few months after seeding, divers,
working from a 32-foot boat, will check on the sea cucumbers every couple of
weeks. After that, they will return approximately once a month until the
animals are harvested when they are two to three years old.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">What do sea cucumbers taste like? One <a href="http://www.deependdining.com/2005/06/slippery-when-braised-sea-_111902560788789901.html">blogger</a>
reports:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Sea cucumber is like a ghost. It seems
substantial but after a few bites it just disappears and gives very little in
flavor and leaves even less in aftertaste. It’s as if you never ate anything,
like el Bulli foam.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">There you go.</span></div>
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Robert Leblinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08265093977381441210noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686840318808961364.post-82821928141300643392012-06-02T22:00:00.000-07:002012-06-22T10:10:18.246-07:00When Giant Funguses Ruled the Earth<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzJ7bna4iru2K4Q_DU3qEAcpDiynSU8fux_eCgYIjx7Z4hP_6p7rmsW8vxg21wTi-EA88_COClUvpClr-QUhIRsjon4p18fnUbcV_FP1C3qsSnhtO2aHn02CxRhuZvYiPO2Z9nKALuSYE/s1600/Prototaxites.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="166" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzJ7bna4iru2K4Q_DU3qEAcpDiynSU8fux_eCgYIjx7Z4hP_6p7rmsW8vxg21wTi-EA88_COClUvpClr-QUhIRsjon4p18fnUbcV_FP1C3qsSnhtO2aHn02CxRhuZvYiPO2Z9nKALuSYE/s320/Prototaxites.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">About 400 million years ago, during the
Devonian period, the world was a very strange place. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Green plant life had begun to cover the land
surfaces of the Earth, but these plants were small, most of them ferns, and
they only grew a foot or two high at most. This was long before the age of the
dinosaurs, and there were no animals with backbones anywhere on land. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">In this placid setting, there arose a form of
life that was stunning in its size and bizarre in its appearance. For more than
a century, scientists have puzzled over its fossils, trying to figure out
exactly what it was. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The fossils are large mineralized columns,
like tree trunks, sometimes reaching eight or more meters (24 feet plus) in
length. They have been found scattered around the globe, in places like Canada,
Australia and Saudi Arabia.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">At first these <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototaxites">life forms</a> were thought to
be trees – conifers. Their name, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prototaxites</i>
(pronounced “pro-toe-tax-eye-tease”) means “early yew tree.” But they had no
branches. They were eventually determined not to be “vascular plants,” the term
used for higher plants with conducting tissues that allow resources like water,
minerals and photosynthesis products to circulate throughout the organism. Later
theories characterized <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prototaxites</i>
as a lichen, or perhaps algae, or fungus.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">In 2007, scientists from the University of
Chicago and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington,
D.C., <a href="http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/07/070423.fungus.shtml">announced</a>
they had finally solved the mystery of “one of the weirdest organisms that ever
lived”: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prototaxites</i> was indeed a
fungus – a giant, tree-trunk-like fungus.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The fungus theory had first been advanced in
1915 and was <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0034666701000586">revived</a>
in 2001 by Francis Hueber of the Smithsonian. Hueber’s research has played a
large part in the latest determination. The Chicago and Smithsonian researchers
found independent <a href="http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/35/5/399.abstract">evidence</a>
supporting Hueber’s contention that the life form was a fungus:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The team did so by analyzing two
varieties—isotopes—of carbon contained in Prototaxites and the plants that
lived in the same environment approximately 400 million years ago.</span><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The metabolism of plants is limited by
photosynthesis. Deriving their energy from the sun and their carbon from carbon
dioxide in the air, any given type of plant will typically contain a similar
ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-13 as another plant of the same type. “But if
you’re an animal, you will look like whatever you eat,” [Chicago’s C. Kevin] Boyce
said. And <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prototaxites</i> displayed a
much wider variation in its ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-13 content than would
be expected in any plant.</span><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Geological processes can alter the isotopic
composition of fossils, but Boyce and his colleagues conducted tests to verify
that the carbon isotopic composition of the specimens they analyzed stemmed
from organic rather than geologic factors.</span><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">As for why these bizarre organisms grew so
large, “I’ve wondered whether it enabled Prototaxites to distribute its spores
widely, allowing it to occupy suitable marshy habitats that may have been
patchily distributed on the landscape,” [the Smithsonian’s Carol] Hotton said.</span><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The relatively simple Devonian ecosystems
certainly seemed to contain nothing to prevent them from growing slowly for a
long time. Plant-eating animals had not yet evolved, Boyce said. But even if <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prototaxites</i> hadn’t been eaten by the
dinosaurs and elephants that came much later, they probably grew too slowly to
rebuild from regular disturbances of any kind, Boyce said.</span><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">“It’s hard to imagine these things surviving
in the modern world,” he said.</span><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><o:p> </o:p></span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">So it’s official: The Devonian was the period
when giant funguses ruled the Earth.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYQIUCt9SAC6KwVaiOableB_VjGBy-6KAEWNXlDc1vZMIM16prlS2Qhsm-PyNNLrZ8zoAw-EnmVmNNiJ_WRyPrNr0itViCjD-ZIwJGCh2e32LI1YI0lAkesamRiMs6c6K9UgnBGmcK02g/s1600/liverworts+to+Prototaxites.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="192" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYQIUCt9SAC6KwVaiOableB_VjGBy-6KAEWNXlDc1vZMIM16prlS2Qhsm-PyNNLrZ8zoAw-EnmVmNNiJ_WRyPrNr0itViCjD-ZIwJGCh2e32LI1YI0lAkesamRiMs6c6K9UgnBGmcK02g/s320/liverworts+to+Prototaxites.jpg" width="320" /></a><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">But wait a minute – someone has come up with
another theory challenging the experts. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">In 2010, Linda E. Graham of the University of
Wisconsin and several colleagues published a <a href="http://www.amjbot.org/content/97/2/268">paper</a> presenting evidence
that the tree-trunk-style fossils of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prototaxites
</i>were not towering columns of fungus after all, but rather rolled-up
liverwort mats (similar to rolls of grass sod).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">As a recent “Catalogue of Organisms” <a href="http://coo.fieldofscience.com/2010/02/prototaxites-giant-that-never-was.html">blog
post</a> describes the new theory:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">In Graham et al.'s estimation, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prototaxites</i> should not be classed with
the fungi but with the liverworts. Liverworts are small, often mosslike plants
of moist habitats. Members of one group of liverworts, the thallose liverworts,
lack any distinction between leaves and stem but grow as a flattened thallus
anchored to the ground by rhizoids (rootlets) on the lower surface…. But modern
liverworts lack strong supporting tissue and would be pushing to reach an inch
in height - how could they have produced the eight-metre columns recorded for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prototaxites</i>?</span><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">A transverse section of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prototaxites </i>shows a ring structure like that found in a tree
trunk. Hueber (2001), who interpreted <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prototaxites
</i>as a perennial fungal fruiting body, felt that this ring structure also
resembled tree rings in indicating discontinuous growth by the organism. Graham
et al. (2010) interpret the ring structure differently. They suggest that large
mats of thallose liverworts covered the Silurian landscape. These mats could
become detached from their substrate by agents such as wind and rain, and start
to roll up as they decayed. As they rolled, they would form the large columns
that, after being compressed by burial and fossilised, would eventually be
identified as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prototaxites</i>.</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The blog author, an entomologist, finds this
new interpretation “intriguing, if a little difficult to accept outright.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">He adds:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Prototaxites</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> is
represented by a reasonable number of specimens (I don't know the actual
number, but thirteen species have been named from numerous localities around
the world) - were the conditions that would have lead to mat-rolling common
enough to have produced that number of fossils? I wonder if it would be worth
investigating how <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prototaxites</i>
specimens compare in abundance to nematophyte specimens and what that might
tell us about the likelihood of '<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prototaxites</i>'
formation from liverwort mats. Certainly, the only thing that could be more
intriguing than the existence of these giant pillars from so early in the
earth's history would be if it turned out that they never existed at all.<o:p></o:p></span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1QRC1oWO18jBC7a32golwvdkIYdTsG3s_PV_zdLu6T-68RbnYBadkVTXwm_JgfB__OmeU6WKFN2iRFcH9NNUNe2CsfPu5TxMUM5CT6jf_7A0cL0hPlFdLama5-YU8Fqwm-lCvMdGiWgY/s1600/giant+Prototaxites.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1QRC1oWO18jBC7a32golwvdkIYdTsG3s_PV_zdLu6T-68RbnYBadkVTXwm_JgfB__OmeU6WKFN2iRFcH9NNUNe2CsfPu5TxMUM5CT6jf_7A0cL0hPlFdLama5-YU8Fqwm-lCvMdGiWgY/s320/giant+Prototaxites.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">On a personal note, I’ve inspected large <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prototaxites</i> fossils recovered by Saudi
Aramco geologists from an area in central Saudi Arabia. They do indeed resemble tree trunks, and one can easily
imagine them standing tall, some 400 million years ago, in the region today
called Najd, swaying slightly in the wind, dominating the ferny landscape for
miles around. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">It is much less easy to imagine them as the
fossilized equivalent of fruit rollups….</span></div>
</div>Robert Leblinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08265093977381441210noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686840318808961364.post-60419307532585707142012-05-19T13:06:00.001-07:002012-05-19T13:21:30.655-07:00Rich Folks<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOVOGFj_A4XM8H_W_BDZKTdHTFT3aHBThQJLat5OuAVOcv-kqUSv4A1EoLgybttzsIianxpOTr_eud7EpVrOre9cFHA7MpZqrgrPXKdU2raP2LxBjDLBjCObssy4oc-l03HLQTz2onz9A/s1600/Visconti+crest.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOVOGFj_A4XM8H_W_BDZKTdHTFT3aHBThQJLat5OuAVOcv-kqUSv4A1EoLgybttzsIianxpOTr_eud7EpVrOre9cFHA7MpZqrgrPXKdU2raP2LxBjDLBjCObssy4oc-l03HLQTz2onz9A/s320/Visconti+crest.jpg" width="266" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Visconti Coat of Arms</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In these days of “class warfare” and politicized resentment
of the rich, it’s good to remind ourselves that things have been worse. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Consider, for example, this description of the sumptuous wedding
of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionel_of_Antwerp,_1st_Duke_of_Clarence">Lionel of England</a>, son of Edward III, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violante_Visconti">Violante Visconti</a>, daughter of Galeazzo
II, Lord of Milan, held in that city in June 1368:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">On arrival in Milan, Lionel was accompanied, in addition to
his own suite, by 1,500 mercenaries of the White Company, which had switched
from the Pope’s service to that of the Visconti. Eighty ladies all dressed
alike – as was customary to enhance the pageantry of great occasions – in
gold-embroidered scarlet gowns with white sleeves and gold belts, and sixty
mounted knights and squires also uniformly dressed came in the train of
Galeazzo to greet him. In addition to a dowry for his daughter so extensive
that it took two years to negotiate, Galeazzo paid expenses of 10,000 florins a
month for five and a half months for the bridegroom and his retinue.</span><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></o:p> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The stupendous wedding banquet, held outdoors in June, left all
accounts gasping. Its obvious purpose was to testify to “the Largeness of Duke
Galeas his soul, the full satisfaction he had in this match and the abundance
of his coffers.” Thirty double courses of meat and fish alternated with
presentation of gifts after each course. Under the direction of the bride’s
brother, Gian Galeazzo the younger, now seventeen and father of a two-year-old
daughter, the gifts were distributed among Lionel’s party according to rank.
They consisted of costly coats of mail, plumed and crested helmets, armor for
horses, surcoats embroidered with gems, greyhounds in velvet collars, falcons
wearing silver bells, enameled bottles of the choicest wine, purple and golden
cloth and cloaks trimmed with ermine and pearls, 76 horses including six
beautiful little palfreys caparisoned in green velvet with gold rosettes, and
two others of extra quality named Lion and Abbott; also six fierce strong
alaunts or war-dogs, sometimes used with cauldrons of flaming pitch strapped to
their backs, and twelve splendid fat oxen.</span><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></o:p> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The meat and fish, all gilded,* paired suckling pigs with
crabs, hare with pike, a whole calf with trout, quails and partridges with more
trout, ducks and herons with carp, beef and capons with sturgeon, veal and
capons with carp in lemon sauce, beef pies and cheese with eel pies, meat aspic
with fish aspic, meat galantines with lamprey, and among the remaining courses,
roasted kid, venison, peacocks with cabbage, French beans and pickled
ox-tongue, junkets and cheese, cherries and other fruit. The leftover food
brought away from the table, from which servants customarily made their meal,
was enough, it was said, to feed a thousand men. Among those who shared the
feast were Petrarch, an honored guest at the high table, and both Froissart and
Chaucer among the company, although it is doubtful if the two young unknowns
were introduced to the famous Italian laureate.</span><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></o:p></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">* With a paste of powdered egg yolk, saffron, and flour,
sometimes mixed with real gold leaf.</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This passage appears in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Distant-Mirror-Calamitous-14th-Century/dp/B002J9VWPW/">A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century</a></i> by Barbara W.
Tuchman.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Lest you think that following this magical wedding everyone
lived happily ever after, Tuchman informs us that four months later Lionel died
of an undiagnosed “fever.” Some suspected he was poisoned by his father-in-law,
but Tuchman thinks it is more likely he died of delayed effects from all that
gilded meat at the wedding banquet, served as it was during the heat of the
Lombardy summer.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The bride, Violante, was married off subsequently to a
“half-mad sadist,” the Marquis of Montferrat, who was given, we are told, to
strangling boy servants with his own hands. He died a violent death. Violante
proceeded to marry her first cousin, who was then murdered by her
brother. She died at age 31, three times
a widow, Tuchman notes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Not much to envy when it comes to those particular rich
folks….</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
</div>Robert Leblinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08265093977381441210noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686840318808961364.post-43007305742386929962012-05-02T12:09:00.002-07:002012-05-02T12:11:10.356-07:00Global Warming and the Rub’ al-Khali<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQQc3kXePMSdJMm2TfYzVsmQeRFHaarMFbXAQDMAjAprYzpuoHQy7SLa0pg2PmpFl3XjfV3UN6CUvte8ZkYHz_pmqDLtKVuzNw5Fy4B7ZeimQ_Ni7bAuj3AqysIMrpXgKk4g4Te3XG4dU/s1600/Glennie+book.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQQc3kXePMSdJMm2TfYzVsmQeRFHaarMFbXAQDMAjAprYzpuoHQy7SLa0pg2PmpFl3XjfV3UN6CUvte8ZkYHz_pmqDLtKVuzNw5Fy4B7ZeimQ_Ni7bAuj3AqysIMrpXgKk4g4Te3XG4dU/s320/Glennie+book.jpg" width="226" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;">A respected geologist and desert expert says global warming could result
in an improved climate for the Rub’ al-Khali and other great deserts of the
world.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;">Kenneth W. Glennie, former Shell geologist and Arabian desert
specialist, suggested a possible return to “the ideal conditions of the
Climatic Optimum” of six to nine thousand years ago, when the Empty Quarter
enjoyed milder temperatures and boasted freshwater lakes, thriving vegetation
and wildlife.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;">If global warming causes a melting of major ice sheets, sea levels
should rise and weather patterns should change, resulting in more rainfall in
the major desert belts accompanied by milder temperatures, according to the
geologist.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;">Glennie set forth this counter-intuitive theory in his <a href="http://www.nhbs.com/the_desert_of_southeast_arabia_tefno_146988.html">book</a>,
<i>The Desert of Southeast Arabia</i>. He says oxygen isotope studies have
shown that when glacial ice sheets expand, as during the Ice Ages, global sea levels
drop, land aridity increases and deserts grow.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;">In his words:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;">To judge from climatic changes over the past million years or more, the
long-term trend for the World ought to be a reversion to the extensive
high-latitude glacial conditions, and this implies increasingly arid conditions
over most of the desert belts. A new, and therefore incompletely proven factor,
is the influence of ‘Global Warming’ and the ‘Greenhouse Effect’, which many
scientists claim to be largely the result of man’s misuse of fuels and
chemicals. If correct, this could have the opposite effect to the above
prediction in that existing ice sheets would melt even further, a rise in
global sea level would reduce the area of land, and the existing desert areas
that remained above sea level would become less arid, perhaps with a return to
the idyllic conditions of the Climatic Optimum.
</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;">Glennie says oxygen isotope data indicates that after the interglacial
peak of 120,000 years ago, the global sea level fell “rather erratically” until
about 17,000 years ago, when a dramatic rise in sea level until about 6,000
years ago brought the level to slightly higher than today. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;">During the 100,000 years of falling sea level “we have little idea of
the associated changes in climate that almost certainly occurred, although
eventually it may be possible to piece together fragments of that history with
accurate dating of some of the alluvial fan sequences,” Glennie says. “Globally,
however, there is evidence that higher rainfall in today’s desert belts
alternated with extremes of aridity…”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;">During periods of interglacial high sea level, Arabia’s climate was
probably much more humid than now. “These high sea levels seem to have been
relatively exceptional,” he says, “and alternated with generally longer periods
of lower sea level with increased areas of land and enhanced aridity.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;">Following the ideal conditions of the Climatic Optimum between 9,000 and
6,000 years ago, the world’s deserts seem to have become slightly more arid
again. Rainfall and vegetation have decreased and winds have probably become
slightly stronger and more persistent, or at least more effective at moving
sand because the increased aridity, according to the geologist.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;">Former Aramco geologist Hal McClure described the formation of ancient
lakes during “less arid” periods in the Rub’ al-Khali in his 1984 doctoral
thesis for the University of London. As <a href="http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/198903/lakes.of.the.rub.al-khali.htm">reported</a>
in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Aramco World</i> magazine:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;">In fact, evidence indicates that lakes formed twice: once from roughly
37,000 to 17,000 years ago, and then again from around 10,000 to 5,000 years
ago. In the interim, "hyper-arid," period, as today, rain was very
rare.</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;">McClure theorizes that the lakes were created by cataclysmic rainfall,
like that seen in the summer monsoons which today water the Indian subcontinent
and, on the Arabian Peninsula, extreme southern Oman. He speculates that the
summer monsoon moved to the north twice in recent geological history, most
likely creating lakes in what he calls "one-time fill-up incidents."<br /> </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;">"It would rain like hell one monsoon season and then not rain in a
particular area for the next 10 or 100 years," he says. The lakes had no
links with rivers, above or below ground, or any other source of continuous
replenishment, and their bed sediments present no evidence of regular
refilling.</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;">Rub' al-Khali lakes "weren't enormous lakes like in East Africa or
like Lake Superior," explains McClure. They probably ranged in depth from
two to 10 meters (six to 32 feet), he says, though some were only
"ephemeral puddles." A few may have lasted several years, but most
existed only "a few months to a few years."</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;">Geologist Glennie was born in Scotland in the United Kingdom. He had a long
career with Shell as a desert expert, and has won numerous academic and
professional honors. In 2005 he received the Sidney Powers Memorial Award, the
most distinguished honor of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists
(AAPG).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</div>Robert Leblinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08265093977381441210noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686840318808961364.post-43449952305708435122012-04-23T10:57:00.000-07:002012-04-23T10:59:56.537-07:00Space Mining for Fun and Profit<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3Y1x0HNTRGVMVqRPaTUtTkrRWsj31Qv7mTWn4Eo1_kPRZXJjQmdPVqljdclhsgf5eA5OVf8DFMY6u68ezv572oPpJ8wnqu_1mq9166Reqo8qZfBOEYQ2TDFepwNJTAmskrAbeHxqi-_E/s1600/243_ida.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="231" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3Y1x0HNTRGVMVqRPaTUtTkrRWsj31Qv7mTWn4Eo1_kPRZXJjQmdPVqljdclhsgf5eA5OVf8DFMY6u68ezv572oPpJ8wnqu_1mq9166Reqo8qZfBOEYQ2TDFepwNJTAmskrAbeHxqi-_E/s320/243_ida.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Asteroid Ida and Its Moon Dactyl</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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This week in Seattle a new startup called Planetary
Resources Inc. is unveiling its plans to mine the solar system for natural
resources. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The venture is backed by Google luminaries Larry Page and
Eric Schmidt, by filmmaker James Cameron and by Ross Perot’s entrepreneur son,
among others.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Few specifics are available so far, apart from a bare-bones
press release that says the company it would "overlay two critical
sectors—space exploration and natural resources—to add trillions of dollars to
the global GDP" and "help ensure humanity's prosperity."<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Also involved in the project are several former NASA
officials who have spoken out on the subject of space mining, particularly
extracting minerals from asteroids and other space objects.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Wall Street Journal</i>
<a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303513404577356190967904210.html">notes</a>
that NASA has done its own studies on the subject:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Earlier this month, a study by NASA scientists concluded
that, for a cost of $2.6 billion, humans could use robotic spacecraft to
capture a 500-ton asteroid seven meters in diameter and bring it into orbit
around the moon so that it could be explored and mined. The spacecraft, using a
40-kilowatt solar-electric propulsion system, would have a flight time of
between six and 10 years, and humans could accomplish this task by around 2025.<br />
The estimated cost doesn't include the billions of dollars
that it might take to extract minerals.<br />
<o:p> </o:p>"[W]ith the right ground-based observation campaign
approximately five attractive [asteroids] per year could be discovered,"
said the NASA study, published by the Keck Institute for Space Studies. It also
said that by exploring asteroids people may be able to gain information or find
raw materials that would allow humans to travel far beyond the moon.</blockquote>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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Cameron’s blockbuster film “Avatar” involved the mining of a
precious (fictional) mineral called “unobtanium” on a moon in the Alpha
Centauri star system.<o:p></o:p></div>
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There was a flurry of discussion about six years ago on the
subject of space mining and its possible benefits in two key areas: the energy
sector and the environment. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj83bSfOWN-K0gGO9qDW-SjF8jX8ERRGO3XjYJAJerPersr3pAiF21d-tnd475Dx9JX1EUT-rDtclKIOw33Y4Oj7Nf3udj8I3iioydI5qKoae4724zMRvhNw8r7UYuTF80Q5OQHTvUuX3Q/s1600/gal_moon_color.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj83bSfOWN-K0gGO9qDW-SjF8jX8ERRGO3XjYJAJerPersr3pAiF21d-tnd475Dx9JX1EUT-rDtclKIOw33Y4Oj7Nf3udj8I3iioydI5qKoae4724zMRvhNw8r7UYuTF80Q5OQHTvUuX3Q/s320/gal_moon_color.jpg" width="309" /></a></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wired</i> magazine
published an <a href="http://www.wired.com/science/space/news/2006/12/72276?currentPage=all">article</a>
in 2006 on the environmental and energy implications of mining lunar helium-3
on the Moon:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
NASA's planned moon base announced last week could pave the
way for deeper space exploration to Mars, but one of the biggest beneficiaries
may be the terrestrial energy industry.<br />
<o:p> </o:p>Nestled among the agency's 200-point mission goals is a
proposal to mine the moon for fuel used in fusion reactors -- futuristic power
plants that have been demonstrated in proof-of-concept but are likely decades
away from commercial deployment.<br />
<o:p> </o:p>Helium-3 is considered a safe, environmentally friendly fuel
candidate for these generators, and while it is scarce on Earth it is plentiful
on the moon.<br />
<o:p> </o:p>As a result, scientists have begun to consider the
practicality of mining lunar Helium-3 as a replacement for fossil fuels.<br />
<o:p> </o:p>"After four-and-half-billion years, there should be
large amounts of helium-3 on the moon," said Gerald Kulcinski, a professor
who leads the <a href="http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/fti">Fusion Technology
Institute</a> at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.</blockquote>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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Way back in 1997, former U.S. lunar astronaut Harrison
Schmitt, also associated with UW-Madison, wrote a <a href="http://cedb.asce.org/cgi/WWWdisplay.cgi?9701071">paper</a> for the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Journal of Aerospace Engineering</i> on the
proposal to mine helium-3 on the Moon and Mars as an alternative to
conventional fossil and fission fuels:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The corporate vision of a proposed Interlune-Intermars
Initiative encompasses commercial enterprises related to resources from space
that support the preservation of the human species and our home planet. Within
this vision, the major mission objectives of the Initiative are to provide
investors with a competitive rate of return; protect the Earth’s environment
and expand the well-being of its inhabitants by using energy from space,
particularly lunar ³He, as a major alternative to fossil and fission fuels;
develop resources from space that will support future near-Earth and deep-space
activities and human settlement; and develop reliable and robust capabilities
to launch payloads from Earth to deep space at a cost of $1,000/kg or less
(1996 dollars). Attaining a level of sustaining operations for the core fusion
power and lunar resource business requires about 15 years and 10–$15 billion of
private investment capital as well as the successful marketing and profitable
sales of a variety of applied fusion technologies.</blockquote>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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Schmitt, a former U.S. senator from New Mexico and now an
adjunct professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, set up a commercial
company in 1997 called Interlune-Intermars Initiative Inc., whose mission was to
“protect the Earth's environment and increase the well-being of its inhabitants
by using energy from space,” particularly helium-3 mined on the Moon. <o:p></o:p></div>
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There is no evidence Schmitt’s proposal made much headway.
Wikipedia <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Schmitt">claims</a>
“[t]he idea of generating significant power from helium 3 obtained from the
moon is regarded as wildly impractical,” but the only support cited for this
contention is an outdated MIT master’s thesis published in 1994.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Despite his interest in helium-3 as an environmentally
friendly alternative to fossil and conventional nuclear fuels, Schmitt was <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/01/27/207409/denier-harrison-schmitt-holdren-communists/?mobile=nc">attacked</a>
by environmentalists at the time as a “climate science denier” and “crackpot.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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We shall see if Planetary Resources Inc. has any better
luck.</div>
<br />
<br /></div>Robert Leblinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08265093977381441210noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686840318808961364.post-46644166347432547532012-04-15T11:55:00.000-07:002012-04-16T10:10:49.972-07:00The Barbary Apes of Gibraltar<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHzE4OG_ljpxQbu194I2dHgr-VXj0cMheNE5yHg-PX4D0ZqVr9SfPGTKur6yoPxGtp0qW7XV8lP7ZH8Jgo7jd8rzERnb85Y4mSkEH6CFgrNLYyOMd358RB23b8Glep4JrZRRDNYTdQCkU/s1600/290px-Gibraltar_Barbary_Macaque.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHzE4OG_ljpxQbu194I2dHgr-VXj0cMheNE5yHg-PX4D0ZqVr9SfPGTKur6yoPxGtp0qW7XV8lP7ZH8Jgo7jd8rzERnb85Y4mSkEH6CFgrNLYyOMd358RB23b8Glep4JrZRRDNYTdQCkU/s1600/290px-Gibraltar_Barbary_Macaque.jpg" /></a></div>
For many years zoologists and others have
commented on the mystery of Gibraltar’s Barbary Apes – the fact that members of
the ape colony on the Rock appear and disappear unexpectedly, sometimes showing
up in the company of new apes never seen before – despite the fact that there
are no known hiding places on this landmark site.<br />
The speculation is that an age-old subterranean tunnel exists, beneath the
Straits, connecting Gibraltar with the North African coast, and that the apes
have been using this tunnel for transit since time immemorial.<o:p></o:p><br />
Author-iconoclast Charles Hoy Fort, a well-known collector
of reports on strange phenomena, <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=7TTTin2oxpoC&pg=PA598&lpg=PA598&dq=%22barbary+apes+of+gibraltar%22+charles+fort&source=bl&ots=SbksxWHBE5&sig=Por4zcwZwpSCuGH4dtbytTNrvFA&hl=en&sa=X&ei=UAWLT9KaMIiTgweBroz1CQ&ved=0CCQQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false">wrote</a>
about this theory in his book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lo! </i>(1931):<o:p></o:p><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
...In the London <i>Daily Mail</i>, July 1, 1920, a correspondent expresses
an idea... as to mysterious appearances and disappearances of the Barbary apes
of Gibraltar, conceiving of a submarine tunnel from Gibraltar to Africa. “All
these creatures were well-known to the staff of the signal station on the Rock,
many of the apes being named. The numbers sometimes change in the most
unaccountable way. Well-known monkeys are absent for months, and then reappear
with new, strange, adult monkeys of a similar breed. Those who know Gibraltar
will agree that there is not a square yard on the Rock where they could have
hidden.”</blockquote>
<o:p></o:p><br />
A few pages later in the same book, Fort cites another press report on the
same topic:<o:p></o:p><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In the <i>New York Sun</i>, Feb. 6, 1929, Dr. Raymond L. Ditmars tells of an
“old legend” of a tunnel, by which apes travel back and forth, between Africa
and Spain. No special instances, or alleged instances, are told of. In
Gilbard's <i>History of Gibraltar</i>, published in 1881, is mention of the
“wild and impossible theory of communication, under sea, between Gibraltar and
the Barbary coast.” Here it is said that the apes were kept track of, so that
additions to families were announced in the Signal Station newspaper. The
notion of apes in any way passing across the Mediterranean is ridiculous to
Gilbard, but he notes that there are so many apes upon the mountain on the
African side of the Strait of Gibraltar that it is known as the hill of Apes.</blockquote>
<o:p></o:p><br />
Although commonly referred to as “Barbary Apes,” these primates are actually
Barbary Macaques, part of a species of true monkeys (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Macaca sylvanus</i>), not apes. Apart from man, they are the only
primates that live freely in Europe. <o:p></o:p><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhx3QTo6vybQeR1ZBUxvJbdqfU8MbYHhmO5dCQxX5Asl9XBd1HP1u_kk5pa0Men2E20a8mPsDT03E5T4vJvfqn3-Mmd0VMysJEXvY_PQhgRCTZ78Kihm4BWkmsjED7qYOEurgJtWCTa1Dc/s1600/Rock_of_Gibraltar.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhx3QTo6vybQeR1ZBUxvJbdqfU8MbYHhmO5dCQxX5Asl9XBd1HP1u_kk5pa0Men2E20a8mPsDT03E5T4vJvfqn3-Mmd0VMysJEXvY_PQhgRCTZ78Kihm4BWkmsjED7qYOEurgJtWCTa1Dc/s320/Rock_of_Gibraltar.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
The Gibraltar
macaques are in <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/102/20/7392.abstract?sid=a4296123-8557-4d78-9929-d7846d8057cc">fact</a>
descended from North African – Moroccan and Algerian – populations of Barbary
macaques that today can be found mostly in the Middle Atlas mountains. The
macaques have been known on Gibraltar since the British first captured the Rock
in 1704. DNA studies have shown that in addition to their Moroccan and Algerian
origins, the Barbary apes of Gibraltar have a third DNA source, probably from
an extinct Iberian population.<o:p></o:p><br />
According to conventional wisdom, the Gibraltar apes were imported by the
Arabs and Berbers who conquered Spain and ruled substantial parts of the
Iberian Peninsula from 711 to 1492. The macaques were said to have been kept as
pets by the wealthy.<o:p></o:p><br />
The belief in a subterranean passage under the Straits of Gibraltar survives
to this day. A Gibraltar tourism website <a href="http://www.gibraltartours.org/cave.htm">discusses</a> St. Michael’s Cave,
a geological structure linked to the legend of the tunnel:<o:p></o:p><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
St Michaels Cave has interested visitors to Gibraltar ever since the days of
the Romans. The cave was long believed to be bottomless. This probably gave
birth to the story that the Rock of Gibraltar was linked to the Continent of
Africa by a subterranean passage over 24 km long under the straits of
Gibraltar.<br />
Pomponious Mela, one of the earliest writers on geography who lived about
the beginning of the Christian era named the cave after a similar cave in his
home city in Italy.<br />
It was at one time believed that when the Spaniards first tried to retake
Gibraltar from Britain in 1704, a party of 500 of their troops spent a night in
the cave after climbing the East face of the Rock. Next morning, however the
alarm was given and troops of the garrison surprised and overpowered the
raiding party. Many other small caves are linked to the main chamber.</blockquote>
<o:p></o:p><br />
<o:p></o:p><br />
<o:p></o:p><br />
In 2001, a Canadian traveler, James Smith, <a href="http://www.epinions.com/content_2094112900?sb=1">posted</a> some
interesting observations on the Gibraltar Barbary Apes on the Epinions website:<o:p></o:p><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
One of the most well known attractions of Gibraltar, second only to the
famous rock itself, are the bands of semi wild apes that live there. The
Barbary Apes of Gibraltar are the only wild primates in all of Europe. There
are approximately 200 apes in several extended families or packs scattered
among the higher reaches of the "rock" mainly near the Upper Siege
tunnels and at the "Apes Den" near the cable car station. The later
is a regular stop on all the tours. <br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhc8BMgRgfrYfQRIZNcHMhrMjoiaDfrlukeQ3_8pEUQef7fhiY1JegpTE9IYosB3atFe95Utd12wXG4HEt0pfSLcyUTvy9HQ6VGTsI3wWnt3jvs8jThW4PD4atOzptCqfsLSercMQfS5JQ/s1600/220px-Female_Macaque_with_young_suckling.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhc8BMgRgfrYfQRIZNcHMhrMjoiaDfrlukeQ3_8pEUQef7fhiY1JegpTE9IYosB3atFe95Utd12wXG4HEt0pfSLcyUTvy9HQ6VGTsI3wWnt3jvs8jThW4PD4atOzptCqfsLSercMQfS5JQ/s1600/220px-Female_Macaque_with_young_suckling.jpg" /></a></div>
Candy stealing aside,
the apes are used to humans and tolerate the daily procession of tourists who
come and watch them play. They will allow you to get close and feed them and
even pose for pictures. Some of the older ones will even ham it up for the
cameras as long as you treat them. Although they are wild animals, there are
only two things to be careful of, as the tour guides point out.<br />
First never try to get too close to the baby apes. Like most animals, the
mothers are very protective. Secondly, as in the case of the candy lady, be
careful of anything in your hands especially food and/or shiny objects. As far
as the apes are concerned anything they can grab they will, and they'll keep
it. Somewhere in the crevices on the side of the rock it is rumoured there is a
cache of sunglasses, jewelry, cameras, and other items that used to belong to
tourists who didn't heed their guides warnings.<br />
No one is quite sure of how the apes came to Gibraltar in the first place.
One theory is that they arrived with the British soldiers and sailors as pets.
There is however no records to support this idea.<br />
Another theory is that they may have migrated from Africa perhaps through a
subterranean tunnel under the Mediterranean Sea. This theory may not be as far
fetched as it seems. It is only fifteen miles across the straight to Morocco
and the only other known colonies of Barbary Apes are found in the Middle Atlas
Mountains of that country and neighboring Algeria.<br />
Not only does no one seem to know where the apes come from, but no one is
quite sure where they go when they die. No one has ever found the remains of
any of the colony's deceased apes. It appears that they seem to know when it is
their time and disappear into the wilds of the mountain to some undiscovered
ape graveyard.</blockquote>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">Needless to say, the existence of a subterranean
tunnel beneath the Straits of Gibraltar has never been confirmed. The
mystery of the Barbary apes of Gibraltar remains unsolved.</span><br />
<o:p></o:p></div>Robert Leblinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08265093977381441210noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686840318808961364.post-55066850482190853422012-03-23T13:50:00.002-07:002012-04-15T12:47:04.343-07:00Arabian Stonehenge?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj58-kXq3eDq13068n2lmU-TJwp1vjfwoaCulSel2MYBrLbibt_VyNjy8vmBPvc8C7mPBy65bmcII6v2JfmnbwxWkozT0bYtp4xM1rXSfI2DUZsaKIfFbpnwGw8aMXpO1s5dlaXMOAFu6k/s1600/Itine%CC%81raire_Palgrave.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="296" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj58-kXq3eDq13068n2lmU-TJwp1vjfwoaCulSel2MYBrLbibt_VyNjy8vmBPvc8C7mPBy65bmcII6v2JfmnbwxWkozT0bYtp4xM1rXSfI2DUZsaKIfFbpnwGw8aMXpO1s5dlaXMOAFu6k/s640/Itine%CC%81raire_Palgrave.jpg" width="640" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Palgrave's Itinerary</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">An unusual account by a 19<sup>th</sup>-century
explorer of the Arabian Peninsula describes a massive megalithic stone circle
with horizontal lintel stones – much like England's Stonehenge but located in
Central Arabia, on the edge of the Tuwaiq (or Toweyk) Escarpment.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Legend says this megalithic circle was built
by a giant magician named Darim.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The discoverer in question was <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gifford_Palgrave">William Gifford
Palgrave</a>. The account of his travels in the southern part of Qasim appears
in his <i>Personal Narrative of a Year’s Journey Through Central and Eastern
Arabia (1862-63)</i>, published in London in 1865. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Palgrave also mentions two other similar stone
circles, one nearby and the other on the edge of the Hejaz. While there are
many low stone circles in Arabia, this is the first known reference to grand,
European-style megalithic structures with lintels. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQIN7hX56I4mbbTYaSPq4IZhKpAC8Y4i2Xp_JbXzNqrSEMgCJcETyP1Wj1KQfuwQYDo7lqFsLRDXTNdU3-yA4C_HDQ-3QeLhoUhFDv3I33W10ayCZoBwMt1zl2kL1wKJKWB2jEGd0UOKM/s1600/William+Gifford+Palgrave.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQIN7hX56I4mbbTYaSPq4IZhKpAC8Y4i2Xp_JbXzNqrSEMgCJcETyP1Wj1KQfuwQYDo7lqFsLRDXTNdU3-yA4C_HDQ-3QeLhoUhFDv3I33W10ayCZoBwMt1zl2kL1wKJKWB2jEGd0UOKM/s200/William+Gifford+Palgrave.jpg" width="159" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">William G. Palgrave</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Palgrave was an Arabic scholar and Jesuit
priest, who explored the “<i>terra incognita</i>” of the Arabian heartland with
the support of the Jesuit order and French Emperor Napoleon III. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">He posed as a
Muslim during his travels, to avoid hostile reactions from locals in more
isolated destinations. (In 1865, after his book was published, he renounced the
Catholic Church, joined the British Foreign Office and eventually married.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Here is Palgrave’s account of his discovery of
the Arabian Stonehenge:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">We halted for a moment
on the verge of the [Toweyk] uplands to enjoy the magnificent prospect before
us. Below lay the wide plain; at a few miles’ distance we saw the thick palm
groves of ‘Eyoon, and what little of its towns and citadel the dense foliage
permitted to the eye. Far off to our right, that is, to the west, a large dark
patch marked the village and plantations which girdle the town of Rass; other
villages and hamlets too were thickly scattered over the landscape. All along
the ridge where we stood, and visible at various distances down the level, rose
the tall, circular watchtowers of Kaseem. But immediately below us stood a more
remarkable monument, one that fixed the attention and wonder even of our Arab
companions themselves.<br /><o:p></o:p><o:p> </o:p>For hardly had
we descended the narrow path where it winds from ledge to ledge down to the
bottom, when we saw before us several huge stones, like enormous boulders,
placed endways perpendicularly on the soil, while some of them yet upheld
similar masses laid transversely over their summit. They were arranged in a
curve, once forming part, it would appear, of a large circle, and many other
like fragments lay rolled on the ground at a moderate distance; the number of
those still upright was, to speak by memory, eight or nine. Two, at about ten
or twelve feet apart one from the other, and resembling huge gate-posts, yet
bore their horizontal lintel, a long block laid across them; a few were
deprived of their upper traverse, the rest supported each its head-piece in
defiance of time and of the more destructive efforts of man. So nicely balanced
did one of these cross-bars appear, that in hope it might prove a
rocking-stone, I guided my camel right under it, and then stretching up my
riding-stick at arm’s-length could just manage to touch and push it, but it did
not stir. Meanwhile the respective heights of camel, rider, and stick taken
together would place the stone in question a full fifteen feet from the ground.<o:p> </o:p>These blocks
seem, by their quality, to have been hewn from the neighbouring limestone
cliff, and roughly shaped, but present no further trace of art, no groove or
cavity of sacrificial import, much less anything intended for figure or
ornament. The people of the country attribute their erection to Dārim, and by his own
hands, too, seeing that he was a giant; perhaps also, for some magical
ceremony, since he was a magician. Pointing towards Rass, our companions
affirmed that a second and similar stone circle, also of gigantic dimensions, existed there; and, lastly,
they mentioned a third towards the southwest, that is, on the confines of
Hejaz.<br /> <o:p></o:p><o:p> </o:p>That the
object of these strange constructions was in some measure religious, seems to
me hardly doubtful; and if the learned conjectures that would discover a
planetary symbolism in Stonehenge and Carnac have any real foundation, this
Arabian monument, erected in a land where the heavenly bodies are known to have
been once venerated by the inhabitants, may make a like claim; in fact, there
is little difference between the stone-wonder of Kaseem and that of Wiltshire,
except that the one is in Arabia, the other, the more perfect, in England.</span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">No subsequent
explorer ever reported seeing the Arabian Stonehenge, leading other explorers
to question Palgrave’s veracity.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">F.V. Winnett and W.L. Reed, in their <i><a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/Ancient_records_from_North_Arabia.html?id=AZ0OAAAAYAAJ">Ancient Records from North Arabia</a> </i>(1970), have this
comment:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Palgrave (<i>Narrative</i>, p. 251) reported the presence of a
sort of Stonehenge at al-‘Uyun in the province of Qasim but Philby (<i>The
Heart of Arabia</i>, vol. 2 [London , 1922], pp. 140-1) claims this to be a
figment of Palgrave’s imagination. According to Dr. Vidal, the people of the
area have no recollection of any such monument, In any case, the monument
described by Palgrave was different in character from that seen by us [near
Qarah].</span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The “Dr. Vidal” referred to in that passage was archaeologist/anthropologist
F.S. “Rick” Vidal of Aramco’s Arabian Research Division in the 1950s.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">There may indeed be a stone structure similar to Palgrave's
description near the town of <a href="http://www.indexmundi.com/z/?lat=25.8619444&lon=43.0669444&t=p&r=1040&p=an_nabhaniyah&cc=sa&c=saudi_arabia">Nabhaniyah</a>,
west of Ar-Ras, in Qasim. According to Najdi sources familiar with that area,
there is a megalithic stone site close to Nabhaniyah that is used by locals as
a family picnic ground. This claim has not yet been confirmed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The notion that Palgrave may indeed have seen a dramatic
megalithic structure in Central Arabia was supported by a 1998<a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/279/5356/1452.summary"> article</a> in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Science</i> magazine. In that piece,
archaeologists excavating a megalithic site in Yemen proposed the existence of
a widespread Bronze Age megalithic culture throughout the Red Sea region:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">For decades, classical archaeologists focused much of their
attention on the Mediterranean Sea, where Egyptian stelae, Minoan friezes, and
Turkish shipwrecks reveal the rise and fall of empires and the skein of sea
trade among them. Now, new excavations are offering the first, tantalizing
glimpse of an ancient civilization that flourished 4000 years ago near another
major Old World waterway: the Red Sea. Work by researchers from several
different countries on the Red Sea's arid southeastern coast points to a
complex culture whose people enacted costly rituals, possessed metal tools, and
raised daunting megaliths at about the same time as Stonehenge appeared in
Great Britain.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p> </o:p>In research currently in press in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies</i>, Edward Keall, head
of the Department of Near Eastern and Asian Civilization at the Royal Ontario
Museum in Toronto, presents preliminary evidence for a previously unstudied
Bronze Age culture in coastal Yemen. His team members found the ruins of a
circular prehistoric religious site, or henge, built of granite pillars
weighing 20 tons. Buried at the foot of a fallen megalith, they discovered a
cache of copper-alloy tools dated to between 2400 and 1900 B.C. And nearby,
they unearthed fragments of children's skeletons from what appeared to be
ceremonial burials. All this suggests a well-organized people living in an arid
coastal plain once thought to have been almost empty at this time. "People
had assumed that there was nothing there during the Bronze Age," says
Keall.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p> </o:p>Other experts say the finding should draw attention to the
dozen or so similar stone pillar sites scattered across western Arabia.
"These sites have been sort of looked at, but not very thoroughly,"
says Christopher Edens, a research associate in the Near Eastern section at the
University of Pennsylvania Museum. "Now, someone has actually investigated
these things and found this cache of bronzes, which is phenomenal for this area.
I was floored." Moreover, the new excavation, which has yielded the first
date for these mysterious megaliths, raises the possibility that an ancient and
unsuspected trade network operated along this stretch of Red Sea coast....</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p> </o:p><b>Title:</b> Yemen's stonehenge suggests Bronze Age Red Sea
culture.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Author(s):</b> Pringle, Heather</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Source:</b> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Science</i>;
03/06/98, Vol. 279 Issue 5356, p1452, 2p, 1 map, 2c</span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Meanwhile, the search for Palgrave’s "Arabian Stonehenge" continues….<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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</div>Robert Leblinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08265093977381441210noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686840318808961364.post-48031713514890506292012-03-18T21:15:00.003-07:002012-04-28T18:52:37.062-07:00Where Was Ogygia, Isle of Calypso?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimNDMwKMvWa3SThtHzo-gQB2pQjAX6NmVPaxRdJszHAJ6G54GqA9XTIqoaGMaSfsWKh6xKBka1tsQitcIHollAG1FDLrbIqoMSQek-dpGgEqhnvJGcbx2bs5xWoL-tpRrkmKyy4cfGhRU/s1600/Odysseus_and_Calypso.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5721458892270179730" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimNDMwKMvWa3SThtHzo-gQB2pQjAX6NmVPaxRdJszHAJ6G54GqA9XTIqoaGMaSfsWKh6xKBka1tsQitcIHollAG1FDLrbIqoMSQek-dpGgEqhnvJGcbx2bs5xWoL-tpRrkmKyy4cfGhRU/s320/Odysseus_and_Calypso.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 234px; margin: 0 10px 10px 0; width: 320px;" /></a><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">In Homer’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Odyssey,</i> the wandering hero Odysseus spends seven years on the island of Ogygia, as the captive consort of Calypso the nymph. Nymphs, in Greek mythology, were female nature spirits often associated with specific locales. Calypso was said to be the daughter of the Titan Atlas, and so she was also known as “Atlantis.”</span></div>
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The Maltese have long claimed that Ogygia is actually Gozo, the second largest island in the Maltese archipelago. Some say Ogygia was in the Ionian Sea.</div>
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The Greek geographer Strabo of Alexandria (64 BC – AD 24), writing some seven centuries after Homer, argued in a critique of Greek historian Polybius that Homer clearly placed Ogygia not in the Mediterranean, where many assumed all of Odysseus’s exploits to have taken place, but in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.</div>
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To quote Strabo:<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> </span></div>
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<blockquote>
At another instance he Polybius suppresses statements. For Homer says also, 'Now after the ship had left the river-stream of Oceanus', and, 'In the island of Ogygia, where is the navel of the sea', where the daughter of Atlas lives; and again, regarding the Phaiakians, 'Far apart we live in the wash of the waves, the farthermost of men, and no other mortals are conversant with us.' All these clearly suggest that he composed them to take place in the Atlantic Ocean."</blockquote>
<o:p></o:p><br />
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Another prominent classical writer, the Romanized Greek historian Plutarch (46-120 AD), also places Ogygia in the Atlantic. In a fascinating natural history chapter of his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Moralia</i> entitled “The Face on the Moon,” Plutarch <a href="http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Moralia/The_Face_in_the_Moon*/D.html">writes</a>:</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"></span></div>
<blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Well, I am but the actor of the piece, but first I shall say that its author began for our sake — if there be no objection — with a quotation from Homer:</span></div>
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An isle, Ogygia, lies far out at sea,</div>
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a run of five days off from Britain as you sail westward; and three other islands equally distant from it and from one another lie out from it in the general direction of the summer sunset. In one of these, according to the tale told by the natives, Cronus is confined by Zeus, and the antique (Briareus), holding watch and ward over those islands and the sea that they call the Cronian main, has been settled close beside him. The great mainland, by which the great ocean is encircled, while not so far from the other islands, is about five thousand stades from Ogygia, the voyage being made by oar, for the main is slow to traverse and muddy as a result of the multitude of streams. The streams are discharged by the great land-mass and produce alluvial deposits, thus giving density and earthiness to the sea, which has been thought actually to be congealed. On the coast of the mainland Greeks dwell about a gulf which is not smaller than the Maeotis and the mouth of the Caspian sea.</div>
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[MYTHOLOGY NOTE: Briareus was one of the three Hekatonkheires, ancient giants of Greek myth who helped Zeus and the other Olympian gods overthrow the Titans. Cronus and other Titans were imprisoned in Tartarus, beneath the underworld, and the Hekatonkheires were set as guards to prevent their escape. Hekatonkheires means “hundred-handed”; these giants were said to have fifty heads and a hundred hands.]</div>
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</blockquote>
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As <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogygia">Wikipedia</a> notes, this passage in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Moralia</i> has created considerable controversy. Some have used it as classical support for Plato’s account of Atlantis in the <a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/timaeus.html">Timaeus</a>. German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), writing in his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kepleri Astronomi Opera Omnia</i> <a href="http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Moralia/The_Face_in_the_Moon*/Introduction.html#ref47">proposed</a> that “the great continent” mentioned by Plutarch was America and he fixed locations for Ogygia and the nearby islands. German classics scholar Wilhelm von Christ (1831-1906) agreed that the continent was America and was convinced that first-century Norse sailors traveling through Iceland, Greenland and the Baffin Region reached the coast of North America.</div>
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Others believed that Ogygia, placed west of Britain by Plutarch, could be the Emerald Isle. Seventeenth–century Irish historian Ruaidhrí Ó Flaithbheartaigh (<a href="http://www.libraryireland.com/biography/RodericOFlaherty.php">Roderic O’Flaherty</a>) used Ogygia as a metaphor for Ireland in his work <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ogygia: seu Rerum Hibernicarum Chronologia & etc</i> (1685) translated into English as "Ogygia, or a Chronological Account of Irish Events Collected from Very Ancient Documents, etc.</div>
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There is still no consensus on the geographical specifics of Plutarch’s descriptions of Ogygia, the neighboring islands and the great continent beyond. But the fact that two thousand years ago a prominent historian was speaking about destinations west of Britain in the mysterious Atlantic Ocean certainly deserves closer scrutiny.</div>
</div>Robert Leblinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08265093977381441210noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686840318808961364.post-3763614565902691872012-03-10T19:32:00.003-08:002012-03-20T08:44:56.746-07:00Alien Abductions = Jinn Abductions?<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrT-DeODfc9Za_HcSFhVBe-qbHs1jyANHJph1CGojcGySTp8xW7mI9-Ss0jy4kk-AfNJVK3Hjv5V2P1OqPEbj1uWttRGWxTnk3RXci-D8wnfeygpgsPZJNfU7cIOpcZjsI4zzR8UN8GfE/s1600/Walton%2528reconstitution%2529.png" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 237px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrT-DeODfc9Za_HcSFhVBe-qbHs1jyANHJph1CGojcGySTp8xW7mI9-Ss0jy4kk-AfNJVK3Hjv5V2P1OqPEbj1uWttRGWxTnk3RXci-D8wnfeygpgsPZJNfU7cIOpcZjsI4zzR8UN8GfE/s320/Walton%2528reconstitution%2529.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5718486878338970290" /></a><br /> 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font-family:"Times New Roman";} </style> <![endif]--> <!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align: left;line-height: 200%; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: normal; "><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;mso-bidi-font-style:italic"></span></span></p><blockquote></blockquote>A few “alien abduction” investigators have given some thought to the notion that the “Grays” and other described alien types may actually be jinn manifestations. Here, for example, is a rumination from a now-defunct website called <a href="http://www.abductions-alien.com/">www.abductions-alien.com</a><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;mso-bidi-font-style:italic">:</span><p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in;mso-line-height-alt:10.0pt"></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in;mso-line-height-alt:10.0pt">Islam has considerable material that helps identify these “energy-people” and give an idea just what they are. They provide a term that we can use: Jinns; call them Jinns. Most Jinns are good and live mostly in the wilderness. In fact, they appear to “run” nature. Jinns have free will. They can be good or bad. Jinns can shape change and use this ability to trick humans. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in;mso-line-height-alt:10.0pt">Those few Jinns that turn bad enough to take up harassing have found out the new “in” way to harass humans is: Alien abductions! Apparently designing their harassment after the “new” human obsession, aliens, and especially those few original accounts of truly physical abductions, the bad Jinns decided to drop the old fairy appearance and begin shape changing to grey aliens. With their minds, the bad Jinns can rustle up “mother-ships” and their interiors, examination rooms, weapons, instruments, anything. (You can create things too when out of body! But they are good at it for they have lived “there” (higher vibration level) for untold centuries.)</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in;mso-line-height-alt:10.0pt">Unwittingly, your own thoughts help these harassers form the surroundings. You expect a ship, an examination room and its instruments, so your thoughts, energized by fear, construct the surroundings. The Jinns themselves mostly only have to “look like”greys then your mind does the rest!<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-line-height-alt:10.0pt"></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-line-height-alt:10.0pt">Here is part of another, more recent <a href="http://www.oilzine.com/features/features_details.asp?ID=47">web posting</a> on alien abductions that toys with the idea of aliens actually being jinn:</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-line-height-alt:10.0pt"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 48, 96); -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 4px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 4px; font-family:Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:12px;"></span></p><p></p><blockquote><p>Basically, according to research carried out in USA (where else?), 1.5% of the population has been abducted at some time in their life. Doesn't sound much, does it? Well this equates to 4 million Americans and, if consistent around the world, 100 million people. That's a fair amount, not to be sniffed at really.</p><p>Abductors come in many forms. Chiefly they're what are called 'Greys'. These are the clichéd alien type. Grey in colour, very large coal black eyes, eyes just like an ant, a slit for a mouth, no visible ears. You know the kind. We've all seen them, just mostly on TV. These extraterrestrials are fairly nice guys, they don't carry laser guns, and seem to want to make peace with Earthlings: they tell the abductees to remain calm, they won't be harmed, and appear to have strict rules about their interaction with us.</p><p>The other main, and definitely more interesting, abductor type is 'the Jinn'. They're badder, meaner aliens. They are also the oldest form of aliens known to man: mentioned in the Bible and Koran no less (so they say). They don't have an actual physical presence and are more like what people describe as angels. Islamic texts state that the Jinn are able to materialize or disappear at will: this is because, it is suggested, "they are a form of conscious intelligence just like humans but they live on a higher vibratory level without physical bodies". Yeah, right.</p><p>They are said to be the reason that fairy stories exist in most civilisations. These mischievous, sometimes downright evil, pixies have always 'played' with humans just because they can. However, in recent times, they have found a new way to harass humans: alien abductions.</p><p>Purportedly, with their mind power, the Jinns can rustle up space ships and their interiors, complete with examination rooms. In your dreams... well, just maybe.</p></blockquote><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-line-height-alt:10.0pt">Most cultures acknowledge the abduction of humans by otherworldly beings of some kind. Patrick Harpur, author of <i>Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld</i>, <a href="http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/254/body_and_soul.html">says</a> these abductors look different to each society, but they have some constant characteristics: “they are elusive shape-shifters, always ambiguous, notably part-material, part-immaterial, as well as being sometimes benign and, at other times, dangerous and malevolent. Following the ancient Greeks, I call them daimons.”</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-line-height-alt:10.0pt"><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-line-height-alt:10.0pt">Modern daimons include the little gray aliens who snatch people from their cars or beds. Sometimes, Harpur notes, it seems as if the abductees are taken out of their bodies, as if in a waking dream. These are the same kind of ambiguities found by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in his studies of the Trobriand Islanders, whose practicing witches seemed to be able to leave their bodies in similar fashion. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-line-height-alt:10.0pt">“All cultures recognise daimons who abduct us – from the kwei-shins in China and the djinn in Arabia, to the Yunw Tsunsdi of the Cherokees,” Harpur contends.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>In Newfoundland, the daimonic abductors were called the “Good People” – fairies who seem to have come over with the Irish immigrants and who were known for abducting young people while they were out picking berries. The abductees would eventually be found in a state of disarray, bruised and suffering from loss of memory, like many victims of alien abduction. Like the UFO abductees, the berry-pickers would later begin to recall bits and pieces of what happened to them: often they had been lured by exotic music, and were swept up in a bizarre dance. Other berry-pickers returned after a much longer period of time, looking quite different or much older, wracked by fear or rendered simple-minded<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'Times New Roman';">.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-line-height-alt:10.0pt"><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-line-height-alt:10.0pt">In Ireland, those abducted by the Sidhe – nature spirits or fairies – were occasionally allowed to return to their homes after seven years, or after multiples of seven. But they were only sent back to the human world when their years on earth had run out – “old spent men and women,” as Lady Augusta Gregory describes them in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland</i> (1920), “thought to have been dead a long time, given back to die and be buried on the face of the earth.” The reality of these abductions cannot be doubted, Harpur observes, given the many descriptions of “tradition-bearers weeping, sometimes after the passage of many years, as they narrated memorates [i.e., remembered events] dealing with the abduction of their children or other relatives.”</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-line-height-alt:10.0pt"><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-line-height-alt:10.0pt">Sometimes the Sidhe may leave the physical person and take only his or her soul.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>From that moment, the victim begins to waste away in this world. The person is said to be “away” or a “changeling.” What remains, says Lady Gregory, is "a body in their likeness, or the likeness of a body." It may be a “log” is left in the victim’s bed, or a broomstick, or a heap of shavings.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-line-height-alt:10.0pt"><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-line-height-alt:10.0pt">In the case of zombies of Haiti, instead of their souls being taken while their bodies are left behind, their souls remain behind (imprisoned in a sorcerer’s jar) while their bodies are abducted into the Otherworld of the “slave camps.” When they return they are recognized by strangers who take them for dead relatives; whether they are truly lost relatives seems irrelevant.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-line-height-alt:10.0pt">This reverses the European folkloric tradition in which it is the abductees who become strangers, mere “likenesses” which are barely recognized by their relatives. “Such reversals,” says Harpur, “show how the archetypal motif of abduction by daimons, or daimonic humans, occurs in different permutations: sometimes the soul alone is taken into the Otherworld; sometimes only the body (zombies); sometimes both. We should not, in other words, regard the physical, literally, as an absolute barrier. All cultures other than ours regard the body as quasi-spiritual, just as the soul is quasi-material.”</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-line-height-alt:10.0pt"><br /></p><div style="mso-element:footnote-list"><div style="mso-element:footnote" id="ftn3"> </div> </div> <!--EndFragment-->Robert Leblinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08265093977381441210noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686840318808961364.post-36172993632928735972012-03-07T22:19:00.005-08:002012-03-20T08:47:09.971-07:00The Plight of Ain Hit<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgx46KqmFXNZ7ORR0uTs-u_fnhA9fsb3P-dtMEhGIE87fcLLAFn_VNHD2QZln_tvhXajd3XjtZllV2wIKoin0Lc4i2pUzESIYNfkxwckvH0am2DV_eGXUgch9RzG4mic0NWv4F9YNPIG1Y/s1600/image001.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 309px; height: 232px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgx46KqmFXNZ7ORR0uTs-u_fnhA9fsb3P-dtMEhGIE87fcLLAFn_VNHD2QZln_tvhXajd3XjtZllV2wIKoin0Lc4i2pUzESIYNfkxwckvH0am2DV_eGXUgch9RzG4mic0NWv4F9YNPIG1Y/s320/image001.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5717411282933788802" border="0" /></a><br />I don't think much has been done over the past year to correct a problem that caver John Pint reported in one of Saudi Arabia's most important underground sites: Dahl Heet or Ain Hit.<br /><br />An environmental disaster appears to be in the making at the historic Ain Hit cave/sinkhole south of Riyadh. This is where geologist Max Steineke first observed the impermeable anhydrite cap-rock layer that convinced him crude oil had been captured beneath the Eastern Province. Pint reported in February 2011 that the formerly crystal-clear waters of Ain Hit are being polluted by sewage. (The photo above, from the SaudiCaves.com website, was taken in better days, back in 2008.)<br /><br />Since newly hired Saudi Aramco geologists regularly make a “pilgrimage” to this site to learn the story of Steineke’s achievement and observe the anhydrite layer for themselves, I think Saudi Aramco should take an interest in protecting the site for future generations.<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">John Pint’s <a href="http://www.saudicaves.com/sewage/index.html">website</a> quotes a visitor to Ain Hit as saying:<br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in"></p><blockquote>Comparing our data with that of the survey of Gregg Gregory and co-workers from 2002, we encountered the water table ca. 27 m higher than in 2008 at our first visit. Two days later we heard from the Ministry of Water and Energy (MOWE) that 7 km to the north, sewage from Riyadh is forming a lake along the escarpment (see Google Earth). Thus Ain Heeth is involuntarily providing us with a karst tracer experiment. At this time it looks like the water table is going to keep on rising and that trillions of bacteria are making a comfortable living down there. Considering the filthy condition of the water and the recent rock falls, the cave has lost its recreational value, having turned into a very obnoxious and quite dangerous place. I doubt that I will make that trip again....</blockquote> <p></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in">Pint followed up this posting with an email to friends:</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in"></p><blockquote><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">From: JohnandSusy Pint<br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2011 12:26 AM</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">To: ranchopint hotmail</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Subject: Pristine Cave Contaminated by Sewage</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> </p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Hello friends of the Desert Caves,</p><br />Only a few years ago, cave divers in Saudi Arabia were delighted to plunge into the crystal-clear waters of Ain Hit (Ain Heet, Ain Heeth) Cave, but just a few days ago, Dr. Stephan Kempe made a shocking discovery in this cave. The story and pictures are at: <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color:#000080;"><span lang="zxx"><u><a href="http://www.saudicaves.com/sewage/index.html">http://www.saudicaves.com/sewage/index.html</a></u></span></span></p></blockquote><p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><span style="color:#000080;"><span lang="zxx"><u><a href="http://www.saudicaves.com/sewage/index.html"></a></u></span></span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I have heard of no progress to date in correcting the problem. I certainly hope plans are in motion at some level to save Dahl Heet. Perhaps the Arabian Natural History Association (ANHA) in Dhahran could follow up on this issue.<br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><br /></p>Robert Leblinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08265093977381441210noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686840318808961364.post-87849822545458286982012-03-01T07:28:00.003-08:002012-03-20T08:43:19.278-07:00Brain-Eating Amoebas<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx0KRr8_HgmiVgu7bv4m52JVSqzN9KBIP_NeP0AO4F910YUbsSKkh3WqS8IEJs2-LwmCYN_4fFK_J6eZpn2s4_BnMi_uWOWy6vXhS7l6581ebIBltp_pl_7r3B9YrygTdvKnPnfEyAnM8/s1600/Naegleria_%2528formes%2529.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 153px; height: 117px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx0KRr8_HgmiVgu7bv4m52JVSqzN9KBIP_NeP0AO4F910YUbsSKkh3WqS8IEJs2-LwmCYN_4fFK_J6eZpn2s4_BnMi_uWOWy6vXhS7l6581ebIBltp_pl_7r3B9YrygTdvKnPnfEyAnM8/s320/Naegleria_%2528formes%2529.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5714952901047822962" border="0" /></a><br />A news story by a Denver CBS television station reminds us that the fictional world of literature and the movies has nothing on Mother Nature. <p style="margin-bottom: 0in">Last week I was reading up on pop-culture zombies for an article I was writing. Modern-day zombies, of course, are often described as brain-eaters. I also noted that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recently issued a document on how to prepare for a “zombie apocalypse” – not that they are expecting one anytime soon, but the CDC saw the current zombie craze as an opportunity to put out some information on how to deal with a real emergency.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in">Imagine my surprise this morning to read an <a href="http://denver.cbslocal.com/2012/02/28/cdc-issues-warning-about-nasal-washes/">article</a> by CBS4 in Denver warning that people who do nasal washes with tap water run the risk of inviting brain-eating amoebas into their skulls. Says CBS4:</p><p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0in"></p><blockquote>The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Jewish Health in Colorado both have issued a warning about nasal washes after two people have died from using tap water to do their sinus rinse. Health experts say it’s safe to use nasal washes. It’s not about the rinse, it’s about the water. They warn that a mixture from a faucet could be fatal....<br /><br />Marie Fornof, Certified Infection Preventionist ... says not to use tap water. It’s because of a brain-eating amoeba called <span style="font-style: italic;">Naegleria fowleri.</span> It’s common in warm rivers and lakes, but if it travels up the nose to the brain it’s usually deadly...<br /><br />The brain infections caused by the amoeba are rare, but the two most recent deaths in Louisiana were tied to the use of tap water in “neti pot”s to flush sinuses.</blockquote><p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0in"></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in">The CDC warning about zombie-like amoebas? Was this on the level?</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in">Apparently it was. Our old, semi-reliable friend <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naegleria_fowleri">Wikipedia</a> says:</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0in"><i></i></p><span style="font-style: italic;"></span><blockquote><span style="font-style: italic;">Naegleria fowleri</span> (also known as "the brain-eating amoeba") is a free-living excavate form of protist typically found in warm bodies of fresh water, such as ponds, lakes, rivers, and hot springs. It is also found in soil, near warm-water discharges of industrial plants, and unchlorinated swimming pools in an amoeboid or temporary flagellate stage. There is no evidence of this organism living in ocean water.... It is an amoeba, described as such by the the CDC, NCBI, articles on pubmed, and WHO.<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">N. fowleri</span> can invade and attack the human nervous system. Although this occurs rarely, such an infection nearly always results in the death of the victim. The case fatality rate is estimated at 98%.</blockquote><p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0in"></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in">The CDC, presumably more authoritative than Wikipedia, has an <a href="http://www.cdc.gov/parasites/naegleria/faqs.html">FAQ</a> on the amoeba:</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0in"><i></i></p><p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i></i></p><span style="font-style: italic;"></span><blockquote><span style="font-style: italic;">Naegleria fowleri</span> infects people by entering the body through the nose. This typically occurs when people go swimming or diving in warm freshwater places, like lakes and rivers. The <span style="font-style: italic;">Naegleria fowleri</span> ameba travels up the nose to the brain where it destroys the brain tissue.<br /><br />You cannot be infected with Naegleria fowleri by drinking contaminated water. In very rare instances, <span style="font-style: italic;">Naegleria</span> infections may also occur when contaminated water from other sources (such as inadequately chlorinated swimming pool water or heated tap water <47°C) enters the nose, for example when people submerge their heads or cleanse during religious practices (1), and, possibly, when people irrigate their sinuses (nose). </blockquote><p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0in;"></p><p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0in"></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in">Let's hope the CDC isn't funnin' us on this one....</p><br /><p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> </p><a href="http://www.cdc.gov/parasites/naegleria/faqs.html"></a><p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> </p>Robert Leblinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08265093977381441210noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686840318808961364.post-87177333979805417372012-02-29T11:23:00.007-08:002012-03-20T08:49:03.908-07:00Ancient Griffins<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidfMipTjajBnD-TUQgyLT5MX1EbEIC9o-d0bGJEwlxBDvYoxgNu_5IlHDB_vwgy7yECEghizAAE9a_bjOx16hYg0WpfuWujvnjsU5R-LMMiNsjtFZzWzbsmCp46PnC1y29vIfqnUNrqkc/s1600/800px-Carnegie_Protoceratops_andrewsi.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidfMipTjajBnD-TUQgyLT5MX1EbEIC9o-d0bGJEwlxBDvYoxgNu_5IlHDB_vwgy7yECEghizAAE9a_bjOx16hYg0WpfuWujvnjsU5R-LMMiNsjtFZzWzbsmCp46PnC1y29vIfqnUNrqkc/s320/800px-Carnegie_Protoceratops_andrewsi.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5714650210655532850" border="0" /></a><br />A 12<sup>th</sup>-century Spanish Jewish traveler named Benjamin of Tudela crisscrossed Europe, Asia and Africa and wrote a book about his travels. The book was translated from Hebrew to Latin and it offered Europeans vivid descriptions of western Asia about a century before Marco Polo.<br /><p style="margin-left: 0.5in; margin-top: 0.19in; margin-bottom: 0.19in;">Benjamin of Tudela had something to say about the mythological bird known as the griffin or gryphon, well known in Arab imaginative literature as the <span style="font-style: italic;">rukh. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0.5in; margin-top: 0.19in; margin-bottom: 0.19in;"> </p><p style="margin-left: 0.5in; margin-top: 0.19in; margin-bottom: 0.19in"> Of course, in western legend (dating back to the ancient Greeks and perhaps earlier), the griffin was a more complex creature than a simple giant bird, having the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion. </p> <p style="margin-left: 0.5in; margin-top: 0.19in; margin-bottom: 0.19in"> Classical folklorist Adrienne Mayor has <a href="http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/explaining-giant-bones">suggested</a> that this type of griffin may have been an ancient “misconception” caused when the ancients first saw the fossilized remains of the Protoceratops dinosaur in gold mines in the Altai mountains of Scythia, in what is now southeastern Kazakhstan. Protoceratops had an impressive "beak," like an eagle, and of course four legs like a lion.<br /></p> <p style="margin-left: 0.5in; margin-top: 0.19in; margin-bottom: 0.19in"> Regardless, Benjamin of Tudela knew the griffin as a gigantic bird, and here is what he says:</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.5in; margin-top: 0.19in; margin-bottom: 0.19in"></p><blockquote><p style="margin-left: 0.5in; margin-top: 0.19in; margin-bottom: 0.19in;">Thence to cross over to the land of Zin (China) is a voyage of forty days. Zin is in the uttermost East, and some say that there is the Sea of Nikpa (Ning-po?),where the star Orion predominates and stormy winds prevail (1).At times the helmsman cannot govern his ship, as a fierce wind drives her into this Sea of Nikpa, where she cannot move from her place ; and the crew have to remain where they are till their stores of food are exhausted and then they die. In this way many a ship has been lost, but men eventually discovered a device by which to escape from this evil place. The crew provide themselves with hides of oxen. </p> <p style="margin-left: 0.5in; margin-top: 0.19in; margin-bottom: 0.19in;"> And when this evil wind blows which drives them into the Sea of Nikpa, they wrap themselves up in the skins, which they make waterproof, and, armed with knives, plunge into the sea. A great bird called the griffin spies them out, and in the belief that the sailor is an animal, the griffin seizes hold of him, brings him to dry land, and puts him down on a mountain or in a hollow in order to devour him. The man then quickly thrusts at the bird with a knife and slays him. Then the man issues forth from the skin and walks till he comes to an inhabited place. And in this manner many a man escapes (2).</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.5in; margin-top: 0.19in; margin-bottom: 0.19in;"> NOTES:</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.5in; margin-top: 0.19in; margin-bottom: 0.19in;"> (1) Benjamin's statements as to India and China are of course very vague, but we must remember he was the first European who as much as mentions China. Having regard to the full descriptions of other countries of the old World by Arabic writers of the Middle Ages, and to the fact that the trade route then was principally by sea on the route indicated by Benjamin, it is surprising that we have comparatively little information about India and China from Arabic sources. In none of their records is the Sea of Nikpa named, and it is not improbable that Benjamin coined this name himself from the root . . . which occurs in the Bible four times; in the Song of Moses . . . (Exod. xv. 8): "The depths were curdled in the heart of the sea" (not "congealed" as the Version has it), Job x. 10: . . . "curdled me like cheese"; and in Zeph. i.12 and Zech. xiv. 6. The term "the curdling sea" would be very expressive of the tempestuous nature of the China Sea and of some of its straits at certain seasons of the year.</p></blockquote><p style="margin-left: 0.5in; margin-top: 0.19in; margin-bottom: 0.19in"></p> <blockquote><p style="margin-left: 0.5in; margin-top: 0.19in; margin-bottom: 0.19in;"> (2) Marco Polo has much to say about the bird "gryphon" when speaking of the sea-currents which drive ships from Malabar to Madagascar. He says, vol. II, book III, chap. 33: "It is for all the world like an eagle, but one indeed of enormous size. It is so strong that it will seize an elephant in its talons and carry him high into the air and drop him so that he is smashed to pieces; having so killed him, the gryphon swoops down on him and eats him at leisure. The people of those isles call the bird "Rukh." Yule has an interesting note (vol. II, p. 348) showing how old and widespread the fable of the Rukh was, and is of opinion that the reason that the legend was localized in the direction of Madagascar was perhaps that some remains of the great fossil Aepyornis and its colossal eggs were found in that island. Professor Sayce states that the Rukh figures much--not only in Chinese folk-lore--but also in the old Babylonian literature. The bird is of course familiar to readers of <em>The Arabian Nights.</em> </p></blockquote>[Source: Adler, Marcus Nathan, ed. and trans. <span style="font-style: italic;">The Itinerary of Benjamin Tudela: Travels in the Middle Ages. </span>London: Philipp Feldheim, 1907, pp. 94-95.]Robert Leblinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08265093977381441210noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686840318808961364.post-44614284755528397802012-02-27T12:46:00.004-08:002012-03-20T08:50:38.475-07:00Gaia Hypothesis and Edgar Allan Poe<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1mjX0ojGyHgbotvN8knDxxsy1u-SaveDMxoSLTkl346FY374Sdj3r8XEfDEtN4x4OpZmr07DTyEhoaSRgsbLykHt1dtV8NYGFEYtmULuHYpPKBnF9DPK6EBXqFjAc3084FDQX4K_PHpQ/s1600/Edgar_Allan_Poe_crop.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 259px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1mjX0ojGyHgbotvN8knDxxsy1u-SaveDMxoSLTkl346FY374Sdj3r8XEfDEtN4x4OpZmr07DTyEhoaSRgsbLykHt1dtV8NYGFEYtmULuHYpPKBnF9DPK6EBXqFjAc3084FDQX4K_PHpQ/s320/Edgar_Allan_Poe_crop.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5714295232131676546" border="0" /></a><br />The Gaia hypothesis (now often called the Gaia theory), was formulated by scientists James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis in the 1970s. It contends that all living organisms and the inorganic structure of the Earth are integrated in a single, self-regulating system that maintains the conditions for life on the planet. The system includes the biosphere, atmosphere, hydrospheres and pedosphere.<br /><br />In short, the theory says the Earth acts as if it were a single organism. The hypothesis plays a role in today's ecological/environmental movements.<br /><br />Edgar Allan Poe gave some thought to the ideas underlying the Gaia hypothesis more than a century before Lovelock and Margulis articulated them. Here are Poe's observations, incorporated into the short story "<a href="http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/PoeIsla.html">The Island of the Fay</a>" (1841):<br /><br /><blockquote><span style="font-family:Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:85%;">I love, indeed, to regard the dark valleys, and the gray rocks, and the waters that silently smile, and the forests that sigh in uneasy slumbers, and the proud watchful mountains that look down upon all,–I love to regard these as themselves but the colossal members of one vast animate and sentient whole–a whole whose form (that of the sphere) is the most perfect and most inclusive of all; whose path is among associate planets; whose meek handmaiden is the moon, whose mediate sovereign is the sun; whose life is eternity, whose thought is that of a God; whose enjoyment is knowledge; whose destinies are lost in immensity, whose cognizance of ourselves is akin with our own cognizance of the animalculae which infest the brain–a being which we, in consequence, regard as purely inanimate and material much in the same manner as these animalculae must thus regard us.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family:Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:85%;"><br /><br />Poe, incidentally, wrote a major speculation on the universe called "Eureka," described as a prose poem or an essay on the material and spiritual worlds. It can be found <a href="http://www.eapoe.org/works/editions/eurekac.htm">here</a>.<br /><br /></span>Robert Leblinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08265093977381441210noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686840318808961364.post-20224960183043447652012-02-23T16:41:00.009-08:002012-03-20T08:51:48.147-07:00Arabian Ostrich Egg Found<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjghBiZwf3uBRiIIU5V_waMWyJ3vItGUkaRj6GkI1spdzQm0ZxmO4T89ONNH553W5dxsXyk2yWPdr9JjsHfSV355HjvXKNoowsqzJ99-HfkzjbSaueYVTsOD9mvi7jVmGZzobSGyJaHtHQ/s1600/Ostrich+egg.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 250px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjghBiZwf3uBRiIIU5V_waMWyJ3vItGUkaRj6GkI1spdzQm0ZxmO4T89ONNH553W5dxsXyk2yWPdr9JjsHfSV355HjvXKNoowsqzJ99-HfkzjbSaueYVTsOD9mvi7jVmGZzobSGyJaHtHQ/s320/Ostrich+egg.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5712504266388768034" border="0" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4ZG-xvG5ogL3hWF7ovShJEQadz_F_yq63kWpGwcedZ8lEmwXzb4SqcI5Daz7w0SuTyalQPq-1BV9WFo4kIOEDjagM70AJPXMDeuxe-CgELoBuEPSQ88sY8UciysnHe0nMRDotPFRR5xw/s1600/Al-Hajri+with+ostrich+egg.jpg"></a><br />Some months back, a rare desert find was donated to the new Cultural Center museum of Saudi Aramco in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia: a complete, intact egg shell belonging to the extinct Arabian ostrich.<br /><br />The museum is not scheduled to open for a few years yet, but it is now assembling its collections. Thanks to an Aramco employee, the museum's Natural History Gallery has a fine new addition.<br /><br />Oil workers discovered the egg not long ago in a long-abandoned ostrich nest on the northern edge of the desert called the Rub' al-Khali, or Empty Quarter. It was the only intact egg in the nest, among many others that had been shattered.<br /><br />Aramco desert expert Guraiyan M. Al-Hajri brought the egg to Dhahran, where he donated it to the Cultural Center.<br /><br />Back in the 1930's, Arabian explorer Harry St. John Philby wrote about his own discovery of an intact ostrich egg in roughly the same part of Arabia. He noted that the bird had become extinct in that area some 30 to 40 years earlier.<br /><br />Here is Philby's report:<span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-weight: normal"><br /><br />"Maqainama (incidentally I was at the time exceedingly sceptical about the very name of the place as reported by Major Cheesman, though on that point I was wrong and he was right) is situated about 70 miles due south of Jabrin. The intervening country represents a sort of transition from steppe to sand and consists of wide alternating strips of the one and the other, a dull, dreary country with good pasturage in favourable seasons. In it hares and other game abound, and we found a single complete but broken ostrich egg </span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal">in situ</span></i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-style: normal"><span style="font-weight: normal"> to remind us that before the advent of modern firearms the great bird was an inhabitant of these parts. It became extinct here about forty or fifty years ago, and is now confined to the deserts of northern Arabia around Jauf."</span></span></span><br /><br />– <span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">H. St. John Philby, “Rub' al-Khali: An Account of Exploration in the Great South Desert of Arabia under</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-weight: normal"> the Auspices and Patronage of His Majesty 'Abdul 'Aziz ibn Sa'ud, King of the Hejaz and Nejd and Its Dependencies.” </span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal">The Geographical Journal</span></i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-weight: normal">, Vol. 81, No. 1 (Jan. 1933), pp. 1-21.</span></span>Robert Leblinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08265093977381441210noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686840318808961364.post-39663995966765158812012-02-19T17:48:00.002-08:002012-03-22T19:30:10.040-07:00The Beasts of Ibn Wahshiya<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><b>[Ibn Wahshiya – his full name was Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn ‘Ali ibn Wahshiya al-Nabati – was a scholar, translator and scientist who lived in Mesopotamia in the ninth century AD. He was an Aramaic- or Syriac-speaking Nabataean, and his translations from Syriac to Arabic were celebrated in their day. He studied the sciences extensively in Damascus, Baghdad and Egypt. Given the society in which he lived, his works are rich with discussions of natural magic and the supernatural. The </b><i><b>Book on Poisons, </b></i><b>according to its author, was compiled largely from the Syriac writ</b><b>in</b><b>gs of two Nabataean elders from Kasadan [possibly near Samarkand] named Yarbuqa and Suhab Sat. The work contains recipes for toxic and lethal substances as well as their antidotes. </b><i><b>Ibn</b></i><b> Wahshiya’s most famous work was called </b><i><b>Nabataean Agriculture</b></i><b>. A general comment on Ibn Wahshiya’s mixing of science and magic by translator Martin Levey: “This famous Chaldean was a master of all that touched on miracles, charms, astrology, alchemy, and incantations. These were all considered at that time and place to have scientific value and to be no less objective than Ibn Wahshiya’s writing on</b><b> </b><b>poisons and agriculture.” These excerpts are the first step in compiling a collection of Ibn Wahshiya's descriptions of animals of the medieval Middle East. There will be more to come.... ]</b></div><div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkBopG6z9xXDe-XzmvsuarmRXtgi5tS2LrFkadX5M1i5z0bwcclXzt2x9euVxVCajodJ6Rr6QanLaJfaVJrgMH0v6KQ6_y39f8yzB5Sw9r5LsdStjcbVGZyoWv9RrFGkYAIfmlNN_-pmU/s1600/Beaver_pho34.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5714674777542903794" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkBopG6z9xXDe-XzmvsuarmRXtgi5tS2LrFkadX5M1i5z0bwcclXzt2x9euVxVCajodJ6Rr6QanLaJfaVJrgMH0v6KQ6_y39f8yzB5Sw9r5LsdStjcbVGZyoWv9RrFGkYAIfmlNN_-pmU/s320/Beaver_pho34.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 250px; margin: 0 10px 10px 0; width: 320px;" /></a></div><div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><b>Be</b></span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><b>aver:</b></span></div><div align="LEFT" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 100%;">The beaver is “</span><span style="font-size: 100%;">an animal of a v</span><span style="font-size: 100%;">ery ugly appearance.... It may come into existence from water. It is famous among</span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> people. In rivers and small waters, they are small; in oceans and large waters, they are large. Both large and small beavers are sim</span><span style="font-size: 100%;">ilar in shape but have various colors [including black, which is favored for poison].” Beaver is used in the recipe for the twenty-first poison. (p. 63)</span></div><div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><b><br />
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</b></span></div><div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><b>Chameleon:</b></span></div><div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The chameleon, says Ibn Wahshiya, has “a small body, a hideous eye, a strange color, and always stays in the sun raising its head towards the sun itself.” He adds: “It is well known to the Kasad</span></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">ā</span></span></span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">nians, Persians, Indians, and Arabs. The Arabs call it </span></span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">al-'iw</span></i></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">ā</span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">n</span></i></span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.” He uses chameleon in the recipe for the twentieth poison. (pp. 62-63)</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><b>Mice and Snakes:</b></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Abu Bakr b. Wahshiya said, Some who are of Kasadan invented a bell which, upon ringing, brings out the mice from their holes, out of fear. They manufactured another bell which brings out snakes and vipers when they hear its sound. They made these to be saved from snakes, mice, and others like them which cause harm to man. (p. 36)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><b>MYSTERIOUS ANIMALS</b></div><b><br />
Yārīshtahīwayā</b> <br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Abu Bakr said that this is the wild <i>faţāya</i> (?), as I think, or is like it. When it bites a man, he develops an intense thirst, the eyes become red, he is confused mentally, the body burns strongly, and the feet become black. [An antidote follows.] (p. 70)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><b>Karqūqathī Būratā</b></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Abu Bakr said of this beast that it is the hedgehog [cf. al-Jahiz 5:283; 6:22]. It seems to me, however, that <i>qunfudh</i> is a word of which we are doubtful. When this beast bites, there is a sharp pain in the place of the bite, intense colic in the belly, difficulty of breathing, suppression of urine and bowel movement. [An antidote follows.] (p. 70)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><b>Shabbāmaghshā</b></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Abu Bakr said that he knew that the Nabateans called it <i>qarād shabbā</i> and this man called it <i>shabbāmaghshā.</i> I cannot identify this animal. It is an animal which bites man. The bite does not give great grief at first but after one-half day goes by, the place of the bite becomes black. A strong anxiety befalls the victim, both cheeks become red, his belly is swollen, and his penis becomes tumescent. [An antidote follows.] (p. 70)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><b>Shammakā nahri</b></div><br />
Abu Bakr said that the author of the book said that this beast resembles the weasel but is a little thinner than it. When it sees a man, it pursues him until it bites him. It rushes on all animals to bite them. When vipers, all kinds of snakes, and most animals see it, they try to escape from it. It is unlike the weasel in the rear but resembles it in the face and head. <br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">When one is bitten by it, there occurs a drying of the throat and cartilage of the nose [ i.e., the mucous membranes], a sharp pain at the place of the bite, excessive perspiration having a bad odor, incontinence of urine to such an extent that it is uninterrupted, and poor blood circulation. [An antidote follows.] (p. 70)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><b>Qīmārāsā</b></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">This is an animal similar to the frog. It is found in barren wastelands and deserts where there is no water or moisture. He who is bitten has his flesh fall off little by little in less than an hour in the daytime. With this, there occurs a violent itch in his muscles and in all of his body. He feels colic in his belly together with a strong burning and sharp pricking. The blood is languid. When his flesh falls off and the blood flows, then he perishes. [An antidote follows.] (pp. 70-71)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><b>Qīmārāsā, Treatment of Bite of</b></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">This is an animal in the shape of a frog but it creeps. It does not leap as the frog leaps. The worst of them are those in the sand in winter since it comes into existence in winter and, perhaps, remains in the sand until the summer. It has properties giving such strange effects that the explanation is lengthy. One of its properties is that when man grasps it with his hand, the flesh wastes away little by little on his arms, forearms and more of these limbs if the grasp is prolonged with his hand. [An antidote follows.] (p. 78-79)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><b>Nabţūqimūhā, Treatment for Consuming</b></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">This is a small, red animal. Often its redness verges toward blue. It has numerous legs and two wings by which it flies not too far. It is often to be found on the cucumber (<i>qiththā‘</i>) and on [another species of] cucumber [<i>khiyar</i> – this is smaller than <i>qiththā‘</i>]. People sometimes confine them until they die and dry. Then they make them into a drink or food. Whoever drinks or eats it, has swelling on his tongue, pain in his stomach, blocking at the mouth of his stomach, a little colic in his bowels which is unbearable, an itch on his entire body, and a violent inflammation. [An antidote follows.] (p. 79)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 2.95in;">– <span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Martin Levey, “Medieval Arabic Toxicology: The </span></span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Book on Poisons</span></i></span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> of Ibn Wahshiya and Its Relation to Early Indian and Greek Texts,” </span></span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Transactions of the American Philosophical Society</span></i></span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">, New Series, Vol. 56, Part 7, 1966.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
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</div></div>Robert Leblinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08265093977381441210noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686840318808961364.post-39610692504443748082012-02-18T18:52:00.001-08:002012-02-29T13:30:43.436-08:00First Post<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVRnkSvfxZlqMJ_leM1mK5kYbilN0WO6qRor9HDtM2INVzXhdDtZxsZS688dSlY2rP7iv26oaSP8uS5pYRa4b8Em-4DWjOKCXZtOzE5s6DH-vRAbpGQ5OErT12q7PMib-9Km9ZAEJfP38/s1600/Strange_manuscript.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 202px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVRnkSvfxZlqMJ_leM1mK5kYbilN0WO6qRor9HDtM2INVzXhdDtZxsZS688dSlY2rP7iv26oaSP8uS5pYRa4b8Em-4DWjOKCXZtOzE5s6DH-vRAbpGQ5OErT12q7PMib-9Km9ZAEJfP38/s320/Strange_manuscript.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5714673129227077842" border="0" /></a><br />This blog is named for an early sci-fi novel by under-appreciated Canadian author James De Mille, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Strange_Manuscript_Found_in_a_Copper_Cylinder">"A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder" </a>(1888).<br /><br />The book was unfortunately published after De Mille's death and following the release of H. Rider Haggard's "She" and "King Solomon's Mines." Critics thought De Mille's novel was derivative of those works, but in fact it was written before both of them. It tells the story of a British sailor who finds a "lost world" and "lost civilization" in Antarctica.<br /><br />De Mille's novel symbolizes for me the importance of imagination in our lives. This blog will celebrate imagination and the quest for new knowledge. I welcome comments and posts of any kind that contribute to this end.Robert Leblinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08265093977381441210noreply@blogger.com3