Friday, February 22, 2013

Vitruvian Man



A well formed man, embodying the harmonies of cosmic design.. Inscribed in both a circle and a square.. navel as the center of man. Visions of the microcosm in which a figure, at once human and divine, embraces and embodies the heavens and the earth..

From Giorgio Martini in Treatise, wrote, "Man, called little world, contains in himself all the general perfections of the entire cosmos."

From Marsilio Ficino in Platonic Theology, (calling from human nature) wrote, "..the center of nature, the middle point of all that is, the chain of the world, the face of all, and the knot and bond of the universe."

From Luca Pacioli in On Divine Proportion, wrote, "From human body derive all measures and their denominations, and in it is to be found all and every ratio and proportion by which God reveals the innermost secrets of nature."

Leonardo da Vinci stated in a note he made to himself about the time he drew Vitruvian Man - "By the ancients man was termed a lesser world, and certainly the use of this name is well bestowed, because his body is an analogue for the world."


In the early 1480s, before Leonardo da Vinci left Florence for Milan - "Man," he wrote, (alluding to not only the human body but also the human spirit), "is a model of the world."




There's a possibility that da Vinci drew Vitruvian Man as a self-portrait; Though the origin and first idea, study and thoughts came from Marcus Vitruvius Pollio himself. It is all written in a book he wrote, Ten Books.

Maybe Leonardo da Vinci imagined, thinking of Vitruvian Man as a study of human proportions.. as an overview of the human anatomy.. as an exploration of an architectural idea.. as an illustration of an ancient text, updated for modern times.. as a vision of empire.. as cosmography of the lesser world.. as a celebration of the power of art.. as a metaphysical proposition. His genius, in the end, was to bring all of these things together in a kind of universal self-portrait.. animated by the ancient philosophical injunction "Know thyself," containing worlds both great and small. The individual mind might actually be able to comprehend and depict the nature of.. everything.


Other sources were found on ancient Greece and Rome, on early reception of Vitruvius in Europe, on Christian symbolism and mystical thought, on medieval master builders, on the early history of medicine, and on the artists and architects of the Renaissance.

Writing in the 17th century, Isidore of Seville, the greatest encyclopedist of the so-called Dark Ages, reprised the theme,.. "All things are contained in man," he wrote. "And in him exists the nature of all things."

European theologians and artists wouldn't give abstract schemes a specifically human form for a few centries, but when they did, in the 12th century, what they drew soon insinuated itself directly into the visions of Hildegard von Bingen. - A wheel containing a human figure, whose arms enfolded the whole of the cosmos in an open embrace. Fortunately, an illustration of what Hildegard saw, perhaps based on a drawing of her own survives in a copy of the book she wrote, Book of Divine Works. It dates decades before da Vinci studied the art of Vitruvian Man.

For Hildegard to have admited any influence would have marred her status as a visionary, and consequently, she made not a single reference to the ideas or writings of any other author. But there was much more to her visions than she let on. Although she described them as being of heavenly origin, they had some obvious earthy sources.

To describe Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, brought into being more than half a millenium ago and born of concepts far older still.. 

The picture contains whole lost worlds of information, ideas, stories, and patterns of thought. A true pioneer in the history of both medicine and art. And possibly sending a message out into the world about the nature of.. everything.

Friday, February 15, 2013

The Hum phenomenon



Many, if not all, people have heard of the Hum, a worldwide phenomenon involving a persistent low-frequency humming, rumbling, or droning noise. Reports have come from the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States, Japan, and Germany. It's very difficult to detect with microphones and its source and nature are hard, if not impossible, to locate.

The essential element that defines the Hum is often described as being comparable to that of a distant diesel engine idling, or to some similar low-pitched sound for which obvious sources (e.g., household appliances, traffic noise, etc.) have been ruled out. Many people hear the Hum only inside buildings as compared with outdoors. Many also perceive vibrations felt through the body. Earplugs are reported as ineffective.

In Britain, the most famous example was the Bristol hum that made headlines in the late 1970s. During the 1990s the Hum began to be reported in North America and to be known to the American public, when a study by the University of New Mexico and the complaints from many citizens living near the town of Taos, New Mexico, caught the attention of the media.

June 9, 2011, it was reported that residents of the village of Woodland, England were experiencing a hum that had already lasted for over two months.
It's also been reported since 2010 throughout Windsor and Essex County in Ontario, Canada, where some residents claim it to be correlated with the time of day, or week, while others seem unaffected or unable to hear it.

April 20, 2012 the Canadian Government decided to officially investigate, and the launch of a study was announced on January 21, 2013. Current suspicions are that the noise originates on Zug Island near the southern city limits of Detroit in Michigan.

The Hum has also been heard since at least 2004 by residents on Canada's southwest Coast in the region around the city of Vancouver.

The Hum has also frustrated residents in County Kerry, Ireland. The phenomenon was also recorded in 2012 in Seattle, and Wellington, New Zealand.

The World Hum Database and Mapping Project was launched in December, 2012, in order to build detailed mappings of hum locations and to provide a database of Hum-related data for professional and independent researchers.

Some explanations of hums for which no definitive source has been found have been put forth.
Tinnitus has been suggested by some physicians. It's generated internally by the auditory and nervous systems. However, this theory fails to explain why the Hum can be heard only at certain geographical locations. People who both suffer from tinnitus and hear the Hum describe them as different, and many can find locations where they don't hear the hum at all.

Spontaneous otoacoustic emissions, where human ears generate their own noises. People that hear these sounds typically hear a faint buzzing or ringing, especially if they're otherwise in complete silence, but most people don't notice them at all. However, these emissions occur with equal frequency across age groups within the population, and the Hum typically occurs in regional clusters, and rarely within large metropolitan areas.

Researchers have also tracked down a series of humming noises produced by waves crashing together and into the ocean floor, off the North-West coast of the US. Potentially, sound from these collisions could travel to many parts of the globe. No mechanism has been suggested to explain how the Hum is heard in the middle of remote land masses, hundreds of miles away from any ocean!

In the case of Kokomo, Indiana, a city with heavy industries, the origin of the hum was thought to have been traced to two sources. The first was a pair of fans in a cooling tower at the local DaimlerChrysler casting plant emitting a 36 Hz tone. The second was an air compressor intake at the Haynes International plant emitting a 10 Hz tone. After those devices were corrected, however, the Hum persisted.

Thursday, February 14, 2013

Spontaneous Generation





Spontaneous Generation, is in regards to the origin of life moving ahead., this was known as the vitalist doctrine. Adherents of this ideal maintained that life processes where not determined solely by the laws of the physical universe, but also partly by some vital force, or vital principle.

Definitions of vitalist doctrine from the World English Dictionary: the doctrine that phenomena are only partly controlled by mechanical forces, and are in some measure self-determined., and/or.. in Biology:  a doctrine that ascribes the functions of a living organism to a vital principle distinct from chemical and physical forces.

Here's another: the philosophical doctrine that the phenomena of life cannot be explained in purely mechanical terms because there is something immaterial which distinguishes living from inanimate matter. Vital force: the force that animates and perpetuates living beings and organisms. And (esp in early biological theory) a hypothetical force, independent of physical and chemical forces, regarded as being the causative factor of the evolution and development of living organisms.

Although (by the late 1870s), most scientists agreed that all organisms arose from the reproduction of "preexisting organisms", and the concept of Spontaneous Generation had become history.

Hydrogen



As you may not know already, Hydrogen is the simplest of all the atoms. It consists of nothing more than a single proton, which serves as its nucleus, circled by a single electron. Its simplicity helps to explain why it is by far the most abundant element in the universe. Huge quantities exist in interstellar space, and it is the predominant element in stars. It has such a dominant position among the other elements, that it makes up an astonishing 93 percent of all the atoms in the universe. All the other elements were made either by nuclear reactions taking place in the core of burning stars, or by the catastrophic explosions called supernovas that are sometimes produced when stars die.

Given the major role played by hydrogen in the universe, its surprising to learn that there is very little Hydrogen gas in the Earth's atmosphere. If you were to take 100 million liters of air, only about 5 liters of it would be Hydrogen: Hydrogen is a very light gas. Much of the Hydrogen still found on Earth is bound up in the water molecules that form our great oceans and seas. About three percent of the Earth's crust is made up of Hydrogen atoms. The combination of Hydrogen and Oxygen also produces water, of course but it is this reaction that gave birth to the name of Hydrogen, which is derived from the Greek workds hydro, or "water," and genes, or "creator."

Hydrogen is well known for being a gas that is lighter than air. A balloon filled with Hydrogen will immediately start rising when released and float away. Its low density, the smallest of any gas, gives it this great lifting power in air. It has since been replaced by Helium, which is slightly denser but far safer because it is nonflammable.

Hydrogen is contained in an almost uncountable number of organic, or carbon containing, compounds, and biological compounds present in living organisms. It is often combined directly with carbon in organic molecules. Among the immense variety of organic molecules in which Hydrogen is linked chemically to carbon are hydrocarbons, the long, chainlike molecule found in natural gas and oil that, when broken apart, release the energy we use to run automobiles.

Another group of organic compounds is the carbohydrates, which consist of molecules of Hydrogen, carbon, and Oxygen found in sugars and starchy foods that supply to humans and plant eating animals with energy. Hydrogen compounds are also found in perfumes, dyes, pesticides, DNA, and proteins. The list goes on and on.

Commercially produced Hydrogen gas has many uses in the chemical and food industries. Probaby its most important use in the chemical industry is for the manufacture of Ammonia, an ingredient of fertilizers. For the preparation of food, large quantites of Hydrogen are used in the process called hydrogenation. In this process, Hydrogen is added to a liquid vegetable oil, converting it to a solid such as margarine! Because it contains much less cholesterol, a fatty substance that tends to clog blood vessels, margarine is used as a substitute for butter, which is an animal fat.

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

New Mineral Discovered: Wassonite



Using 21st century nanotechnology, researchers have discovered a new mineral in samples from a meteorite discovered in Antarctica in 1969. The meteorite is 4.5 billion years old and originates from an asteroid that was orbiting between Mars and Jupiter.

The new mineral had alluded scientists for some time since its discovery by a Japanese expedition team to Antarctica more than half a century ago, maybe due to its extremely tiny size - less than one-hundredth as wide as a human hair! Luckily, nanotech has advanced dramatically since the meteorite known as Yamato 691 was discovered - a very well known historical piece within the meteorite research and one of the first nine of such cosmic bodies discovered in the ice fields of Antarctica in 1969.

NASA scientists and their co-researchers from Japan and South Korea discovered the mineral after they found some unknown inclusions on the surface of the meteorite. Upon analysis, they found the new mineral is made up of Sulfur and Titanium molecules that form an intricate crystal lattice, and although this mineral is extremely tiny in size, it represents an integral component of the meteorite's chemical composition.

The mineral was named Wassonite, in honor of Professor John Wasson (UCLA) known for his unrivaled achievements in meteorite research, and was recently approved by the International Mineralogical Association for addition in the official list of minerals.

This latest discovery goes to show just how many minerals are still unknown to scientists. So far, more than 40,000 specimens of celestial materials including Martian and Lunar meteorites have been collected from Antarctica alone. Expect many of these to yield untold secrets.

Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Natural Symmetry



The rocks which form the Earth, the Moon, and the planets are made up of minerals. Minerals are solid substances composed of atoms having an orderly and regular arrangement. This orderly atomic arrangement is the criterion of the crystalline state and it means also that it is possible to express the composition of a mineral as a chemical formula.

When minerals are free to grow without constraint, they are bounded by crystal faces which are invariably disposed in a regular way such that there is a particular relationship between them n any one mineral species. A crystal is bounded by naturally formed plane faces, and its regular outward shape is an expression of its regular atomic arrangement.

We are familiar with symmetrical objects such as boxes, furniture, and even ourselves. Close inspection of such objects will reveal that they can be symmetrical about a plane such that if the object were to be cut in half along the plane, one half would be the mirror image of the other. The human body is symmetrical externally about a vertical plane arranged from front to back.

On the basis of symmetry, crystals can be grouped into six crystal systems, and can be referred to imaginary reference axes. A seventh crystal system, the trigonal, is recognized by many mineralogists. It has the same set of reference axes as the hexagonal system, but has a vertical three-fold axis of symmetry. These reference axes are chosen so as to be parallel to the edges of the unit cell (the repeat unit of pattern in a crystal structure), and hence they can be regarded as having length. Most minerals occur as aggregates of crystals that rarely show perfect crystal shapes. The form of the aggregate, however, can be useful in identification. There is a close link between the structures of a mineral and its physical properties which are, accordingly, of considerable value in identification. And the optical properties depend on the interaction of light.

Nearly all rocks are composed of minerals, but fine specimens are rare and tend to occur in what is called fissures and other cavities where the crystals have been unobstructed during their growth. Many are obtained from the mineral veins. High temperature fluids deposit minerals in cracks and fissures in rocks and many of these veins, are worked as sources of ore. They frequently contain colorful specimens and good crystals, not only of the commercially valuable ore minerals, but also of the accompanying and economically valueless gangue minerals as well.

It is not always necessary to examine or collect from the veins themselves ~ in many instances, it is dangerous or impossible to do so - for mining activity usually results in dumps of discarded material which, if carefully searched, will often yield good specimens.

Good crystals can often be found lining cavities in rocks of virtually every kind, though particular minerals tend to occur in certain environments. Sometimes weathered-out cavity linings, called geodes, are lined with well shaped crystals, and many fine crystals of Amethyst occur in such associations. Pegmatites, which crystallize from relatively low-temperature, volatile-rich magma (fluids), are another source of crystals and rare minerals that frequently grow to large sizes.

Collectors will find some crystals and minerals that are difficult to identify. They are urged to become acquainted with those that are displayed in many national and other museums. Time spent in this way will be amply repaid, not only in terms of identification, but also in becoming more deeply involved in the study of the natural symmetry and natural history.