En búsqueda del paraíso caldaico

By drawing on what the ancient Greeks understood by παράδεισος, and reviewing different conceptions of the biblical paradise as portrayed in the New Testament, the Old and New Testament Apocrypha, the Nag Hammadi Library, the Manichean literature, the Koran, and other mystical sources of Islam, this paper seeks to determine the nature of the ‘paradise’ mentioned in the Chaldean Oracles (frs. 107 and 165). Particular attention is paid to the Christianized reading by the Byzantine scholar Michael Psellus, who arranged Greek traditional themes, motives of Genesis concerning the Garden of Eden, the allegorical exegesis by Philo ofAlexandria, and Neoplatonic doctrines, all together in his Commentary of the Chaldean Oracles.Partiendo de qué entendían los griegos antiguos por παράδεισος, y recorriendo distintas concepciones del paraíso de origen bíblico reflejadas en el Nuevo testamento, los Apócrifos veterotestamentarios y neotestamentarios, los códices de Nag Hammadi, la literatura maniquea, el Corán y otras fuentes místicas del Islam, se intenta precisar la naturaleza del ‘paraíso’mencionado en los Oráculos caldeos (frs. 107 y 165). Se presta especial atención a la lectura cristianizada del erudito bizantino Miguel Pselo, quien, en su Comentario de los Oráculos caldeos, compaginó temas literarios de la tradición griega, motivos del Génesis relativos al Jardín del Edén, la exégesis alegórica de Filón deAlejandría y doctrinas neoplatónicas

The mediating ἴυγξ: ornithology, love magic, mythology, and Chaldean and neoplatonic theology

En griego ἴυγξ designó originariamente un pájaro: el torcecuello. Los rasgos fi sonómicos y el comportamiento del ave debieron de propiciar la creencia de que tenía un poder mágico y de que, atada en cruz a una rueda por una hechicera, habría de atraer a la persona amada. Los mitógrafos helenísticos, aprovechando el asunto del torcecuello como «pájaro de Afrodita», elaboraron dos mitos acerca de la metamorfosis de Iunx en pájaro. Desde los inicios de la época clásica la voz ἴυγξ fue adquiriendo nuevos sentidos, según parece, por metáfora, metonimia o sinécdoque, signifi cados que no siempre se muestran del todo claros en los textos: ‘rueda mágica’, ‘conjuro amoroso’, ‘deseo’, ‘encanto’, etc. En pasajes heterogéneos de contenido religioso la voz ἴυγξ alude normalmente a un tipo de mediación entre dos mundos, el divino y el humano. La especulación fi losófi ca sobre las ἴυγγες como entidades mediadoras o demónicas alcanzó su máxima expresión entre los neoplatónicos que interpretaron los Oráculos caldeos en clave teológica.The Greek term ἴυγξ was originally designated for a bird: the wryneck. The physical features and behaviour of the bird may have given birth to the belief that it had magical powers and that, cross tied to a wheel by a sorceress, it would attract a beloved person. The Hellenistic mythographers exploited the theme of the wryneck as «bird of Aphrodite» and related two myths about the metamorphosis of Iunx into a bird. From the beginnings of the Classical Period the term ἴυγξ was acquiring new meanings to be derived, it seems, by metaphor, metonymy or synecdoche, meanings that are not always perfectly clear in the texts: ‘magic wheel’, ‘love spell’, ‘desire’, ‘charm’, etc. In heterogeneous passages of religious content the term ἴυγξ normally alludes to a sort of mediation between two worlds, the divine and the human. The philosophical speculation about the ἴυγγες as intermediaries or demonic entities reached its peak within the Neoplatonists who interpreted the Chaldean Oracles in a theological way

Spanish History in The Fairy Country: Dealing with Social Trauma in 'Pan's Labyrinth'

Resumen: La celebrada El laberinto del fauno (Del Toro, 2006) pone en escena un cuento de hadas situado en los convulsos tiempos de la primera posguerra civil española. La crítica ha señalado las dificultades para evaluar la conflictiva relación entre historia y fantasía en el ambiguo final feliz de la película, y ha tratado de relacionar la moraleja final con el trauma de la Guerra Civil.En este trabajo, preferimos leer el film a la luz de otro trauma social, el que marca el momento de su producción. Si tenemos en cuenta que la Transición de una dictadura fascista a una monarquía parlamentaria no ha sido abierta ni pacíficamente debatida en las décadas siguientes y que cierto silencio sobre este tema persiste todavía hoy; es posible entender la película como una forma de abordar algunos asuntos pendientes de la cultura española contemporánea.Palabras Clave: Laberinto del Fauno, Del Toro, Trauma Social, Memoria Histórica, Transición Española, Cultura Española.Abstract: The successful film El laberinto del fauno (Del Toro, 2006) presents a fairy tale set in the convulsive times of the Spanish Civil War’s aftermath. The scholarship on this film already established the difficulties inherent in evaluating the conflictive relation between history and fantasy in the movie’s ambiguous happy ending and has tried to relate the film's moral with the social trauma of the Civil War. In this essay, we chose to read the film in the light of another social trauma, that which marked the moment of its production. Considering that the Transition from a fascist dictatorship to a parliamentary monarchy has not been openly and peacefully discussed in the subsequent decades, and that a tense silence in regards to this topic continues to this very day, it is possible to understand the movie as an attempt to address some unfinished business in contemporary Spanish culture.   Key Words: Pan’s Labyrinth, Del Toro, Social Trauma, Historical Memory, Spanish Transition, Spanish Culture.

Review of real brain-controlled wheelchairs

This paper presents a review of the state of the art regarding wheelchairs driven by a brain-computer interface (BCI). Using a brain-controlled wheelchair (BCW), disabled users could handle a wheelchair through their brain activity, granting autonomy to move through an experimental environment. A classification is established, based on the characteristics of the BCW, such as the type of electroencephalographic (EEG) signal used, the navigation system employed by the wheelchair, the task for the participants, or the metrics used to evaluate the performance. Furthermore, these factors are compared according to the type of signal used, in order to clarify the differences among them. Finally, the trend of current research in this field is discussed, as well as the challenges that should be solved in the future

El etnógrafo como contrabandista. Tráfico de imágenes, propagación de conceptos y usos de la cultura material en la obra de Alfred Métraux

The present paper develops a few hypotheses regarding the traffic of material culture in Latin America and its impact, both in the field con anthropologic knowledge and in the artistic vanguards of the first half of the twentieth century. The circulation networks thatsupported the exchange of images and objects between ethnographers and institutions that supported their research allow for the reconstruction of the itineraries followed by those objects, the footprints of those trajectories in the construction of knowledge, the demarcation of disciplinary fields and the transgression of epistemological frontiers, associated to the emergence of new aesthetic objects and sciences such as anthropology

Brain switch mode: an alternative to drive a brain-controlled wheelchair

To date, different control paradigms of low level navigation have been tested for brain-controlled wheelchairs, mainly divided into continuous or discrete control [1]. However, these paradigms have certain drawbacks such as the need to keep the mental tasks active for a long time, as in continuous mode, or the impossibility to freely choose any distance of the movement or the turn, as in the discrete mode. An alternative paradigm to solve these problems could be the use of the brain switch mode [2], which would allow a more flexible control of the distance, requiring a lower workload for the user.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Proposals of Control Paradigms Applied to a Brain-Controlled Wheelchair

Proposals of Control Paradigms Applied to a Brain-Controlled Wheelchair, Ron-Angevin R., Velasco-Álvarez F., Fernández Rodriguez A., Proceeding og the BITs 4th Annual World Congress of Smart Material 2018, Osaka (Japan), 6-8 March 2018Several of the neurological diseases that human beings can result in severe disabilities. In some cases, people who suffer from such deficiencies lose any chance of communication with their environment, being the only possible alternative to give the brain a new channel not based on muscular activity, allowing these people to send messages and commands to the external world. The systems that allows the latter is what is known as Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI). Their common feature is to process the brain’s electrical activity for extracting information that can be used to command an external device, as for example, a wheelchair to provide them some mobility. One of the most important limitations of these brain controlled wheelchair is to guarantee that a person can, through his mental activity, safely control the variety of navigation commands that provide control of the wheelchair: advance, turn, move back, and stop. The vast majority of the mobile robot navigation applications that are controlled via a BCI demand that the user performs as many different mental tasks as there are different control commands, worsening the classification accuracy. In order to enable an effective and autonomous wheelchair navigation with a BCI system without worsening user performance, the Brain–Computer Interface (BCI) group of the University of Málaga (UMA-BCI) proposed and later developed a new paradigm based on the discrimination of only two classes (one active mental task versus any other mental activity), which enabled the selection of four commands: move forwards, turn right, move backward and turn left. The final aim of this contribution is to show how to control a robotic wheelchair through the use of only two mental tasks. The mapping of these two mental tasks into several navigation commands allows the Brain-Controlled Wheelchair to be moved and turned in order to achieve effective navigation.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Remodelado de los conos de Dirac en aislantes topológicos y grafeno

Tesis inédita de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Ciencias Físicas, Departamento de Física de Materiales, leída el 04-10-2019Quantum mechanics was in all its splendour at the beginning of the twentieth century with the great minds of Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Dirac, Pauli and many others. The concepts introduced by then were truly revolutionary, even more than Einstein’s relativity, one would dare say. One may have a feeling that nowadays we only exploit the consequences of quantum mechanics to build devices such as transistors or light-emitting diodes, which on the other hand have changed the world we live in beyond imagination. With regard to the theoretical front, it may seem that one only has to turn the mathematical handle to work out consequences of quantum mechanics, although no new concepts are in sight. However, nothing could be farther from the truth. We are priviledged to live in what has been dubbed as a second quantum revolution...La mecánica cuántica alcanzó su máximo esplendor a principios del siglo XX de la mano de grandes científicos como Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Dirac, Pauli y muchos otros. Los conceptos que estos físicos introdujeron fueron increíblemente revolucionarios, incluso uno podría aventurar a decir que superaron a la relatividad de Einstein. Hoy en día pudiera parecer que únicamente explotamos las consecuencias de la mecánica cuántica para construir transistores o diodos emisores de luz, dispositivos que, por otra parte, han cambiado por completo el mundo en el que vivimos. En lo que respecta a la física teórica, uno podría pensar que lo único que queda por hacer es encender la maquinaria matemática y esperar a obtener resultados, sin nuevos conceptos que descubrir. Sin embargo, nada más lejos de la realidad. Tenemos la suerte de vivir en lo que los expertos denominan la segunda revolución cuántica...Fac. de Ciencias FísicasTRUEunpu