Monday, September 23, 2013

Überbreite

#Trucks #Lkw Überbreite (Deutsch) - wide load, excess width (English)

Saturday, July 20, 2013

Plutarch’s Moralia

The face on the moon

Sec. 929 - note
The first evidence of the moon’s heat was obtained by Melloni in 1846 by means of the newly invented thermophile.

Sec. 934
The apparent color of the moon in total eclipse was as late as the 16th century adduced as evidence that the moon had light of its own, a notion entertained as possible even by W. Herschel.

The principles of cold

Sec. 953

The poets tell us that the Night was born of Earth and mathematicians demonstrate that night is the shadow of Earth blocking the light of the sun.

Thursday, July 18, 2013

Aristotle - The Physics - Books I-IV

xxx
Aristotle never represents the supreme being as the creator of the material universe. On the contrary, he believes in the eternity of matter-in-motion.

xliii
It was Socrates who brought forward the general conception of classes or kinds in which there was a group resemblance amid individual differences. It has ever since remained at the basis of science and philosophy alike, for it is the principle of generalization and classification.

lxvii
Aristotle urges throughout the Physics that no mechanical movement is self-initiated by matter.

lxix
In Aristotle’s time the precession of the equinoxes had not been observed.

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

The story of Rubha Devi

Om trayambakam yajaamahe sugandhim pushtivardhanam,
Urvaarukamiva bandhanaan mrityor mukshiya maamritaat.

Meditate on the three-eyed reality that causes all life to flourish,
Just as the gourd is cut from bondage to the plant, may the soul
be liberated from the body at death, for the soul is immortal,
Fear not death.

Saturday, June 29, 2013

Essay on Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson, published 1803-1882

Page 176
natura naturans vs. natura naturata
In Aristotelian terms natura naturans would be form and activity, and natura naturata would be matter. These terms were probably first used by Averroës, the Arabian commentator on Aristotle; later, Nicolas Cusanus, Giordano Bruno and Spinoza employed the same distinction. Natura naturata, or nature passive, is used by pantheistic philosophers to distinguish the universe in its ultimate, unitary significance from the universe as aggregate of objects.


Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Inorganic corporate slave

I
I’m a techie, a linguist, a Guru, a geek,
I’m an inorganic corporate slave,
From Sanskrit to Latin from Urdu to Greek,
I’ll talk to you on every plane.

                        II
I’m a virus, a Trojan, a drone and a freak,
I’m online, I’m offline,
I post once a week,
I’m everything you ever craved.

                        III
I’m an avatar inside you,
I’m inside your head,
On the plane of reality,
I’m willing to transmit.

                       IV
I’m neural, I’m viral, I’m visceral, I’m sleek,
I’m a voice on the cosmic waves,
I’m a signal from heaven,
I’m a roar from the deep.
I’m a blip on your hyper plane.

                       V
I’m an algorithm, your customer,
Your master, your drone,
I provide you everything you need,
From service, to feedback,
From data to tweets,
I encourage your compliance,
To stay on the trajectory of growth.

Written by Martin Forrestal, July 2013


Friday, June 14, 2013

Notes from the poems of Mandelstam

Konstantin Nikolaevich Batyushkov (1787 – 1855), a contemporary of Pushkin, was one of the greatest of Russian poets. ‘The Dying Tasso’ is among his best-known poems.

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Essay on Experience by Ralph Waldo Emerson, published 1803-1882

Page 74

The consciousness in each man is a sliding scale, which identifies him now with the First Cause, and now with the flesh of his body; life above life, in infinite degrees. The sentiment from which it sprung determines the dignity of any deed, and the question ever is, not what you have done or forborne, but at whose command you have done or forborne it.

Fortune, Minerva, Muse, Holy Ghost, — these are quaint names, too narrow to cover this unbounded substance. The baffled intellect must still kneel before this cause, which refuses to be named, — ineffable cause, which every fine genius has essayed to represent by some emphatic symbol, as, Thales by water, Anaximenes by air, Anaxagoras by (Noûs) thought, Zoroaster by fire, Jesus and the moderns by love; and the metaphor of each has become a national religion.

Saturday, June 08, 2013

Aristotle on the Heavens

Aristotle on the Heavens
VI
Books IX 25 - 71 & X
XXV
There cannot be more than one world. Since the existence of a world implies the existence of a transcendent being to move it, a plurality of worlds would entail a plurality of transcendent movers, which is an impossibility.

Page 2
Body is defined as a species of the continuous.
Page 24

According to Simplicius, it was believed that the astronomical records of the Egyptians went back for 630,000 years, and those of the Babylonians for 1,440,000.

In Chapter VII Aristotle argues that the body of the world in not infinite.
In Chapter VIII he argues that there cannot be more than one world.
He says that a thing that did not move would not be a body at all. πâѵ σŵμα αίσθητòѵ ëχϵι ...

Page 78
The elements move more quickly as they approach their natural places.

Page 87
ouranos : is world, heavens or sky.

Page 93
aeon is the total time which circumscribes the length of life of every creature, and which cannot in nature be exceeded.

Ch. XII, Page 127

The impossibility of anything that was once eternal afterwards being destroyed, or anything once non-existent afterwards being eternal, may also be seen from less general and more scientific arguments. Things which are destructible or generated are all subject to change. Change takes place by means of contraries, and physical bodies are destroyed by the agency of the same elements of which they are composed.

Ch. VII, page 180
The notion was widely held in antiquity that bodies moving through air became heated by it.
Cf. Lucretius vi. 178: plumbea vero glans etiam longo cursu volvenda liquescit.
(A leaden ball in whirling through a long course even melts)


Ch IV, Page 293
As the triangle is the elementary plane figure to which all plane figures can be reduced, so the pyramid is the elementary solid.

Ch V, Page 303

The elements, then, are neither infinite in number nor reducible to one, and must therefore be (a) a plurality but (b) a limited number.






Friday, June 07, 2013

Extract from The Bhagavad-Gita translated by Barbara Stoler Miller (Bantam Books, 1986)

‘ You grieve for those beyond grief,
And you speak of words of insight;
But learned man do not grieve
For the dead or the living.

Never have I not existed
Nor you, nor these kings;
And never in the future
Shall we cease to exist.

Just as the embodied self
Enters childhood, youth, and old age,
So does it enter another body;
This does not confound a steadfast man.

Contacts with matter make us feel
Heat and cold, pleasure and pain.
Arjuna, you must learn to endure
Fleeting things – they come and go !

When these cannot torment a man,
When suffering and joy are equal
For him and he has courage,
He is fit for immortality.

Nothing of nonbeing comes to be,
Nor does being cease to exit;
The boundary between these two
Is seen by men who see reality.

Indestructible is the presence
That pervades all things;
No one can destroy
This unchanging reality…’


Wednesday, June 05, 2013

Theoretical Bases of Indo-European Linguistics - The set of numerals

Notes from the book
Theoretical Bases of Indo-European Linguistics
Winfred P. Lehmann
Publish by Ruthledge, 1993


Notes on the numerals 1 to 10 in Indo-European languages
The set of numerals
P253
Numeral systems in general are constructed around some selected standard, often that of the digits of one hand or both. The Sumerian system is constructed on the set of fingers for one hand; 6 is 5 + 1, 7 is 5 + 2, and so on to ten, which is an independent lexical item, as are the numbers 1-5. The Indo-European system is also based on the digits of one hand (Greek pénte ”five” – Hittite pankus “the whole”), but differs from Sumerian in having independent lexical items for 6, 7, 9, and probably 8 as well, although the suggestion has been made that the word for eight is a dual of the etymon of Avestan ašti- “four fingers” that was selected to represent the numeral (Henning 1948: 699).
After 10, differences are found from dialext group to dialect group. Gernaic and Baltic represent 11 and 12 as “one left over” and “two left over”, Latin and Greek as 1-10, 2-10, but from 13 the Greek form is “three and ten”, etc.; moreover, Latin represents 18 and 19 as “two from twenty, one from twentty”. More such forms that are restricted to one dialect or one dialect ggroup could be cited.

The numerals from 20 to 100 show further differences. For our purposes those numerals may be adequately represented by giving side by side representations for 20, 40, 60, 80, 100.

Numbers
Sanskrit
Greek
Latin
Gothic
20
viṃśatí
eikosi
vīgintī
twai tigjus
40
catvāriṁśát
tetterákonta
quadrāgintā
fidwor tigjus
60
ṣaṣtí
heksékonta
sexāgintā
saihs tigjus
80
aśītí
ogdoékonta
octōgintā
ahtautehund
100
śatá
hekatón
centum
hunda



P254
Treatment of the system of the lower numerals has yielded explanations for those to 5. Proto-Indo-European *oinos has long been explained as based on the root ?ey- “this one”. I have proposed that the word for two is based on the root *dew- “further”, as in Hittite tuwa “distant”. Moreover, that the word for three is based on the root *ter- “even further”, as in Sanskrit tiráh (1990a: 40). We may recall that Greek énē “the third day” is in origin “that (day)” (Specht 1944: 16). And if the Hittite meywes is a reflex of the Proto-Indo-European word, an additional numeral has been explained (Neu 1987: 176-7); based on the root *mey- “lessen”, the word for 4 would represent the lesser hand of four fingers, in contrast with 5 for the whole hand. The initial system would then have been based on pointing to objects – first as closest at hand, second as farther from the speaker, the third even farther, while the words for 4 and 5 represent symbolizations with four and five fingers.

The most convincing explanation for the words for 6 to 9 is by means of borrowing or calques, although the word for 9 may be related to the root *new- as in Latin novus “new”.


Saturday, June 01, 2013

German technical terminology

Stopfbuchsbrille (German) gland follower, follower, gland flange

Friday, May 31, 2013

Latin quotes

Res nolunt diu male administrari
Things refuse to be mismanaged long

Latin proverb:
Crimen quos inquinat, aequat
You can speak to your accomplice on even terms

Primi in omnibus proeliis oculi vincuntur
The eyes are the first to be conquered in every battle

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Essay on Friendship by Ralph Waldo Emerson, published 1904

Page 214

Emerson writes what a friend is:

A friend is Janus-faced; he looks to the past and the future. He is the child of all my foregoing hours, the prophet of those to come, and the harbinger of a greater friend.

Friday, May 17, 2013

Glossaries - a Lemma


A proposal of my own (would you call it a Lemma?):

If you remove all verbs from a glossary about a particular theme there will be no loss of knowledge in the glossary about that theme.

Amphisbaena


Amphisbaena a mythological, ant-eating serpent with a head at each end, spawned from the blood that dripped from the Gorgon Medusa’s head in Greek mythology.



Thursday, May 16, 2013

Victor Hugo, Les Contemplations (L'Hydre)


"Car, au-dessous du globe où vit l'homme banni,
Hommes, plus bas que vous, dans le nadir livide,
Dans cette plénitude horrible qu'on croit vide,
Le mal, qui par la chair, hélas ! vous asservit,
Dégorge une vapeur monstrueuse qui vit !
Là, sombre et s'engloutit, dans des flots de désastres,
L'hydre Univers tordant son corps écaillé d'astres ;
Là, tout flotte et s'en va dans un naufrage obscur ;
Dans ce gouffre sans bord, sans soupirail, sans mur,
De tout ce qui vécut pleut sans cesse la cendre ;
Et l'on voit tout au fond, quand l'½il ose y descendre,
Au delà de la vie, et du souffle et du bruit,
Un affreux soleil noir d'où rayonne la nuit !"
- Victor Hugo, Les Contemplations, VI.26 Ce que dit la bouche d'Ombre

La légende des siècles

L'hydre Univers tordant son corps écaillé d'astres ;

The Hydra-shaped universe twists its body covered in scales of stars ;



Old Norse

Hann tekr sverthit Gram ok leggr i methal theira bert. (He takes the sword Gram and puts it in the middle of their bed.) - Nordic mythology, Völsunga Saga

Urdu - Gaelic similarities

Kinara (= at the water's edge in Urdu); Cinn Mhara (= head of the sea in Gaelic); Kinvara (English) – amazing similarities!

Noam Chomsky's book "New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind"


An interesting passage from Noam Chomsky's book "New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind," published in 2000

Pp 120, 121

He talks about the computational procedure in language having no counters:
"The computational procedure has properties that may be unique to it, in substantial part. It is also "austere", with no access to many of the properties of other cognitive systems. For example, it seems to have no "counters". It registers adjacency; thus every other syllable could have some property (say, stress). But it cannot use the notion three. There are no known phonological systems in which something happens every third syllable, for example; and syntax seems to observe a property of "structure dependence", unable to make use of linear and arithmetical properties that are much simpler to implement outside the language faculty."

Page 161
"It has very recently been discovered that while insects seem marvelously adapted to particular kinds of flowering plants, in fact insects achieved virtually their present diversity and structure millions of years before flowering plants existed. When they appeared, 'there was already waiting for them an encyclopedia of solutions waiting for the problems to be solved,' Richard Lewontin (1990) points out intending to stress the meaninglessness of these intuitive categories for biology."

Page 163
"Darwin firmly denied that he attributed 'the modification of species exclusively to natural selection', emphasizing in the last edition of Origin of Species that 'in the first edition of this work, and subsequently, I placed in a most conspicuous position – namely, at the close of the Introduction – the following words: 'I am convinced that natural selection has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification.' This has been of no avail. Great is the power of steady misrepresentation' (cited in Gould 1982). Darwin took explicit note of a range of possibilities including nonadaptive modification and unselected functions determined from structure." 
 
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