How the Turtle Lost its Shell: Sino-Tibetan Divination Manuals and Cultural Translation

This article is a pan-Himalayan story about how the turtle, as a cultural symbol within Sino-Tibetan divination iconography, came to more closely resemble a frog. It attempts a comparative analysis of Sino-Tibetan divination manuals, from Tibetan Dunhuang and Sinitic turtle divination to frog divination among the Naxi people of southwest China. It is claimed that divination turtles, upon entering the Himalayan foothills, are not just turtles, but become something else: a hybrid symbol transformed via cultural diffusion, from Han China to Tibet, and on to the Naxi of Yunnan. Where borders are crossed, there is translation. If we go beyond the linguistic definition of translation towards an understanding of transfer across semiotic borders, then translation becomes the reforming of a concept from one cultural framework into another. In this way, cultural translation can explain how divination iconography can mutate and transform when it enters different contexts; or in other words, how a turtle can come to lose its shell

Music as Evidence for a Creator

Throughout history, mankind has made music. While music is artistic, it is also scientific and informed by natural occurrences within the physical world. Mathematical relationships between frequencies, the harmonic series, the materials necessary to build musical instruments, and naturally measured time provide bases for the musical elements of pitch, timbre, and rhythm. Though scientific discovery can inform the practice of music, the origin of music cannot be explained through scientific or evolutionary means because music is not a necessity for survival. The fact that music does exist and has natural bases suggests that music is designed, and its elements were placed in the physical world by a Creator who is beyond that which is physical

Twelve type II-P supernovae seen with the eyes of Spitzer

Core-collapse supernovae (CC SNe), especially those of type II-plateau (II-P), are thought to be important contributors to cosmic dust production. The most obvious indicator of the presence of newly-formed and/or pre-existing dust is the time-dependent mid-infrared (MIR) excess coming from the environment of SNe. Our goal was to collect publicly available, previously unpublished measurements on type II-P (or peculiar IIP) SNe from the Spitzer database. The temporal changes of the observed fluxes may be indicative of the underlying supernova, while spectral energy distribution (SED) fitting to the fluxes in different IRAC channels may reveal the physical parameters of the mid-IR radiation, presumably due to warm dust. IRS spectra were extracted and calibrated with SPICE, while photometric SEDs were assembled using IRAF and MOPEX. Calculated SEDs from observed fluxes were fit with simple dust models to get basic information on the dust presumed as the source of MIR radiation. We found twelve SNe satisfying the criterion above, observed at late-time epochs (typically after +300 days). In three cases we could not identify any point source at the SN position on late time IRAC images. We found two SNe, 2005ad and 2005af, which likely have newly-formed dust in their environment, while in the other seven cases the observed MIR flux may originate from pre-existing circumstellar or interstellar dust. Our results support the previous observational conclusions that warm new dust in the environment of SNe contributes only marginally to cosmic dust content.Comment: Accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysics; 15 pages, 8 figures, 9 tables (Ver. 2.: language edited version, minor corrections were made in the title, in the text, and in the reference list