Classics in Contemporary Culture

Mapping The Heavens

Leigh Fenly (San Diego Union-Tribune) runs through the history of uranography.  Ptolemy's "1,400-year grip on the constellations" died hard...

The oldest astronomical cuneiform texts from 3000 B.C. record the Sumerian names of the early constellations, but historians believe they could be at least a thousand years older. Through contact with the Phoenicians, these found their way to Greece, where they were given new names – Andromeda, Cassiopeia, Cepheus, Perseus – based on Greek mythology.

The Greeks produced the most important early sky cartographer, or uranographer – from the Greek words ouranos (heavens) and graphein (describing). In the second century A.D., Claudius Ptolemy recorded the magnitude of 1,022 stars and grouped them into 48 constellations. Stars in the southernmost skies were invisible from Alexandria's latitude, so Ptolemy's star chart had a big southern starless void.

Petronius Took A Beating

ChevronTexaco's offshore oil and gas platform, named Petronius (after the oil field it was constructed to exploit, which was itself discovered in 1995), is in the news, having been battered by Hurricane Ivan...There's a power point presentation downloadable here with a slide everyone should have ready to deploy:  PETRONIUS--ROMAN PHILOSOPHER AND ALSO THE NAME OF A TEXACO OIL PRODUCTION PLATFORM OFF THE LOUISIANA COAST.  [That's a big ol' sic on the "Roman Philosopher"].  There's another such project, by the way, named Brutus...

Lucretius' Vision

Before following the link, if you choose to accept, try this challenge--How in the world is the writer of this piece going to transition to De-Lovely (the movie-bio of Cole Porter)?

The Roman poet Lucretius is credited with first noting the physiological principle of the persistence of vision, in 65 B.C. The principle holds that an image imprinted on the retina stays in the brain for some length of time after the original image disappears. This is the principle that makes movies possible and is mirrored in the structure of a film. "The Day After Tomorrow" is actually a ribbon of still photographs, just as "The Kiss" was in 1896.

The brain holds on to make sense of what it sees, to put things together, to figure out the story. Even at the physiological level, we have a drive to make narrative out of atomized data, to see patterns. Being able to see a leopard in shadows was more than a talent for our progenitors; it meant survival and the ability to pass on genes.

Goddesses in the News...

First, there's an underwater humanoid robot named Artemis, put together by Texas' Mainland Robotics Team...

Then, Jo Hilton, owner of Wig Wham, is up for a Hera Award (the Everywoman categories [UK] also include Artemis, Demeter, and Athena Awards)...

And...sequins are in! As Marylou Luther (Cleveland Plain Dealer) describes the trend:

They're already sending off sparks in Roland Nivelais' new collection. The French-born New York designer has celebrated these glittering spangles (in his native France, they're called paillettes) in the truly breathtaking design illustrated here. Each sequin is hand-embroidered in overlapping rows that ombre from black to pink to give the effect of fish scales.

To complete the mermaid effect, Nivelais creates a skirt of vertical ruffles made of hand-painted, satin-faced organza. Think goddess Aphrodite stepping out of the ocean on the island of Cypress, and you have some idea of this goddess gown.

Er...Cyprus...

[In other editing news (uh-oh, catty comment coming up!), Marvin Olasky refers to a "Milton of Croton" in a piece on the Olympics...Milton, thou shouldst have been living at that hour! For Milo(n), see this or any number of reference works...]

Music & Math

Edward Rothstein (NYTimes) writes about the connections between music and mathematics--recognized for ages, as the mention of a recent book makes clear--and how it all affects your brain...(file under: biomusicology)

But more recently seminars in music and mathematics have been proliferating at universities. Last fall Oxford University Press published an anthology, "Music and Mathematics: From Pythagoras to Fractals." On Thursday night in Weill Recital Hall, the Siemens Foundation also presented four recent winners of the Siemens Westinghouse Competition, a high school science research competition, playing various instruments. The event featured a discussion by scientists interested in music, including Dr. Mark Jude Tramo, the director of the Institute for Music & Brain Science at Harvard University, who has studied the neural basis of musical perception for over a decade.

What sort of picture of musical understanding is taking shape with this renewed interest? Much of the brain research is teasingly inconclusive.

Polaris Rising

At the Rocky Mountain News: the North Star hasn't always been this bright! The evidence is observations by ancient astronomers...

Both Ptolemy and Al-Sufi listed the North Star as a magnitude-3 star, [astronomer Edward] Guinan said.

The system of magnitudes that astronomers use to rank the brightness of stars was invented in ancient Greece by Hipparchus.

The brightest stars in the sky were labeled first-magnitude stars by Hipparchus. Those about one-half as bright he called second-magnitude stars, and so on to sixth-magnitude stars, the dimmest stars Hipparchus could see.

Today, Polaris is classified as a magnitude-2 star.

That means the North Star is now about 2.5 times brighter than it was 2,000 years ago, a finding that Guinan called preliminary.

"If it's true, Polaris is undergoing much larger changes than believed, hundreds of times larger than expected by current stellar evolution theory," he said.

Volcanos, Plague, Global Warming

In a piece on global warming, Richard Lovett (San Diego Union-Tribune), citing the views of Univ. of Virginia's William Ruddiman, talks about ancient deforestation in Europe and the Mediterranean (fairly extensive by the birth of Christ), and historical dips in carbon dioxide levels--corresponding with times of plague, such as at the "height of the Roman Empire." Hmm...

Socrates and Bioethics

Paul Seaton (Tech Central Station) defends the President's Council on Bioethics against attacks from liberals and libertarians...focusing on two political scientists who are members of the council, Diana Schaub and Peter Augustine Lawler. He appeals to the examples of Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates, as well as Bacon and Locke, to suggest that these individuals do indeed have a rightful place at the table. More than that:

Speaking of Socrates, Schaub and Lawler are particularly Socratic in their attention to various "soul-types," distinctive configurations of thought, character, and personality into which humanity -- ancient and contemporary -- ranges itself. It is here that people like today's humanitarian scientists and partisans of the autonomous self get uncomfortable with Socrates and those who follow his interrogatory practice. His probing questions force them "to give an account" of their views, their agendas, and themselves. That is tough to do, of course, and not everyone goes away grateful for the experience. Lawler in particular for some time has been querying both of the above-mentioned types who have large stakes in the biotechnical/bioethical debates. After all, they claim a particular expertise in truth and knowledge, freedom, and the human good or goods. They're worth examining and cross-examining. That is how science and human wisdom progress, isn't it?

Doubtful History

A review of Jennifer Michael Hecht's Doubt: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy, From Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson appears in the Australian Financial Review...The book. Her story begins with Xenophanes and Socrates,

...progresses through Cicero, Lucretius, Marcus Aurelius and Sextus Empiricus in Rome...

...and continues to the present day.

Bush Will Save Us from the Fate of Greece & Rome

At NRO, John Wohlstetter comments on George Bush's announcement of his commitment to a space program:

History teaches that great civilizations must look outward and embrace grand — though achievable — visions to remain ascendant. When they turn inward — at least, for periods longer than needed to consolidate after expansion — decline sets in. Such a turn can take the form of fratricidal, internecine warfare (classical Greece), exhaustion at the empire's frontier (Rome after the death of Marcus Aurelius), or an end to the spirit of exploration (Ming China).