30,073 research outputs found
The History of Astrometry
The history of astrometry, the branch of astronomy dealing with the positions
of celestial objects, is a lengthy and complex chronicle, having its origins in
the earliest records of astronomical observations more than two thousand years
ago, and extending to the high accuracy observations being made from space
today. Improved star positions progressively opened up and advanced fundamental
fields of scientific enquiry, including our understanding of the scale of the
solar system, the details of the Earth's motion through space, and the
comprehension and acceptance of Newtonianism. They also proved crucial to the
practical task of maritime navigation. Over the past 400 years, during which
positional accuracy has improved roughly logarithmically with time, the
distances to the nearest stars were triangulated, making use of the extended
measurement baseline given by the Earth's orbit around the Sun. This led to
quantifying the extravagantly vast scale of the Universe, to a determination of
the physical properties of stars, and to the resulting characterisation of the
structure, dynamics and origin of our Galaxy. After a period in the middle
years of the twentieth century in which accuracy improvements were greatly
hampered by the perturbing effects of the Earth's atmosphere, ultra-high
accuracies of star positions from space platforms have led to a renewed advance
in this fundamental science over the past few years.Comment: 52 pages, 14 figures. To appear in The European Physical Journal:
Historical Perspectives on Contemporary Physic
Psychic embedding â vision and delusion
The paper introduces the idea that the human brain may apply complex mathematical modules in order to process and understand the world. We speculate that the substrate of what appears outwardly as intuition, or prophetic power, may be a mathematical apparatus such as time-delay embedding. In this context, predictive accuracy may be the reflection of an appropriate choice of the embedding parameters. We further put this in the perspective of mental illness, and search for the possible differences between good intuition and delusive ideation. We speculate that the task at which delusional schizophrenic patients falter is not necessarily of perception, but rather of model selection. Failure of the psychotic patient to correctly choose the embedding parameters may readily lead to misinterpretation of an accurate perception through an altered reconstructed of the object perceived
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Performing Empire: Theater and Colonialism in Caroline Link's Nirgendwo in Afrika
In Caroline Link's popular 2001 film Nirgendwo in Afrika, a Jewish family fleeing the Holocaust finds refuge in British-controlled Kenya. Theater plays a crucial role in the film: Members of the Redlich family explicitly call upon one another to engage in roleplaying. They make use of theater to experiment, imaginatively, with their new roles within the colonial establishment. The film's production team, as I point out, was similarly preoccupied with questions of theater and theatricality. In interviews, the film's director and producers claim that their indigenous extras struggled to understand the distinction between fiction and reality, often became overly caught up in the roles they were portraying, and could only be, not truly perform, for the camera. In this way, the film's production team discounts their indigenous extras as genuine collaborators and, ultimately, justifies their monopoly over the work of cultural representation. If theater and performance are often portrayed as opening up a path to greater political and social emancipation, we find here instead an example of how it can be used both to initiate individuals into a colonial hierarchy and to maintain and reinforce patterns of exclusion
Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to rule by sense of smell! Superhuman Kingship in the Prophetic Books
An exploration of the Hebrew Bible's prophetic literature vis-Ă -vis Science Fiction and Science Fiction theor
The 2007 Iranian 'hostage crisis' : an Orientalist captivity narrative
Concerned with the deployment of discourses within the representing culture and not principally with that which it seeks to portray. These accounts, in terms of their mediation by the newspapers concerned as well as their anticipated reception by a British readership, would be denuded of much of the urgency of their meaning without the availability of deeply embedded discourses that we can group under the umbrella of Orientalism
Recent Conceptual Consequences of Loop Quantum Gravity. Part II: Holistic Aspects
Based on the foundational aspects which have been discussed as consequences
of ongoing research on loop quantum gravity in the first part of this paper,
the holistic aspects of the latter are discussed in this second part, aiming at
a consistent and systematic approach to eventually model a hierarchically
ordered architecture of the world which is encompassing all of what there
actually is. The idea is to clarify the explicit relationship between physics
and philosophy on the one hand, and philosophy and the sciences in general, on
the other. It is shown that the ontological determination of worldliness is
practically identical with its epistemological determination so that the
(scientific) activity of modelling and representing the world can be visualized
itself as a (worldly) mode of being.Comment: 20 page
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