LUCIAN AND THE GREAT MOON HOAX OF 1835

The science of astronomy has had a long and distinguished history at the Cape of Good Hope (hereafter referred to as “the Cape”). This is no accident, since Cape Town was for many years (since 1652, in fact) the only fortified and inhabited European settlement in the southern hemisphere. Thus when astronomers in The Netherlands, France, and England turned their attention to mapping the southern skies it was to the Cape that they brought their instruments. In addition, the mother city of South Africa is only about eighteen degrees east of the Greenwich meridian in London, so that observations of the skies in London and Cape Town could be made from approximately the same longitude. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, star-gazing was not merely a matter of academic interest; on it depended the accuracy of navigational aids used by the merchant and naval shipping of these and other nations. The interest shown in Cape Town by the British astronomical community is also evident from the construction of the Royal Observatory at the Cape in 1820 by the Admiralty. This observatory was intended to be the counterpart of the Greenwich Observatory in London (Evans 1981a:196; Warner 1995). In addition to this interest in navigational accuracy, the invention of the refracting telescope at the beginning of the seventeenth century provided the means for scientists to make star-maps of the southern skies more accurate and complete. The Dutch astronomer, Peter Kolbe, was sent to the Cape in 1705, and in 1751 a Frenchman, the Abbé De La Caille, also arrived there for this purpose (McIntyre 1951:3-5; De La Caille 1763b). The latter was considerably more successful than the former; he added 9766 stars and 42 nebulae to the celestial catalogue (De La Caille 1763a). Among other things he determined the distance between his Cape observatory in Strand Street and the moon (De La Caille 1751)

ANDREW LANG, COMPARATIVE ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE CLASSICS IN THE AFRICAN ROMANCES OF RIDER HAGGARD

The long-standing friendship between Andrew Lang (1844-1912)1 and Henry RiderHaggard (1856-1925)2 is surely one of the most intriguing literary relationships ofthe Victorian era.3 Lang was a pre-eminent literary critic and his support forHaggard’s earliest popular romances, such as King Solomon’s mines (1885) andShe (1887), helped to establish them as leading models of the new genre ofimperial adventure fiction.4 Lang and Haggard co-authored The world’s desire(1890)5 and the ideas of Lang, who was also a brilliant Classics scholar, can beseen in many of Haggard’s works. There are some significant similarities betweenthe two men: both were approximate contemporaries who lived through the mostaggressive phase of British imperialism, both were highly successfully writers whoearned their living by their pens, both wrote prolifically and fluently on a wide range of subjects,6 both were largely self-educated, both were interested in thesupernatural, both had had unhappy experiences in love at first but later maintainedlong-lasting marriages, and both were men with powerful faculties of imagination.There are, of course, significant differences also: Lang was a gifted intellectualwho had won a fellowship at Oxford, a Homeric scholar, a poet with a gift forirony and humour, and one of the earliest exponents of the new science ofanthropological mythology; Haggard was less well educated and more seriousminded,he preferred action to ideas, was personally involved in the extension ofBritish rule in Southern Africa,7 and had a close experience of African tribal life.This article sets out to investigate the relationship between these two men, and toassess the extent to which Lang’s classical and anthropological thinking shaped thenarratives of Haggard, especially those set in his imperialistic fantasy of theAfrican continent

THE HERSCHEL OBELISK, CLASSICS, AND EGYPTOMANIA AT THE CAPE

Immediately prior to his departure from Cape Town to England in 1838, Sir John Herschel sold the estate, ‘Feldhausen’,1 on which he had erected his telescope and had conducted his astronomical observations, to Mr. R. J. Jones, an auctioneer. The property was sold with a servitude: a circular patch of ground 63 feet in diameter bounded by newly planted fir trees was to be kept in Sir John’s possession in perpetuity.2 This area marked the spot on which the telescope had actually stood. At the centre of the circle Herschel placed a small cylindrical column of granite engraved ‘I. H. 1838’ representing his initials in Latin (for Ioannes Herschelius) and the year in which he had completed his work and was leaving the colony.3 Subsequently, the members of the South African Literary and Scientific Institution, of which Herschel had been President,4 decided to commemorate his scientific achievements and his contributions to education in the Cape. At first they had the idea of devising a series of six gold medallions inscribed with the details of his scientific achievements.5 These had been paid for by a voluntary subscription and were designed by Herschel’s assistant, Charles Piazzi Smyth, whose father Rear-Admiral William Henry Smyth had recently (1834) published a catalogue of Roman Imperial medals.6 However, more had been collected than was expended and so the members decided to widen the scope of the exercise and to erect a more suitable memorial on the ground on which the telescope had stood. A meeting of the subscribers chaired by the Governor, Sir George Napier, was held in November 1838 to decide on the form the memorial should take. The resolutions taken at the gathering stated that it was to be ‘a permanent memorial’ and, although no further information about its exact architectural form was given is given in the resolutions, it must be assumed from subsequent references that it was to be an obelisk.7 The committee requested Professors Forbes and Henderson (who had been the second Royal Astronomer at the Cape) to arrange for stone-cutters to make a yellow-granite obelisk from a granite slab taken from a quarry near Edinburgh.

Basic Module Theory over Non-Commutative Rings with Computational Aspects of Operator Algebras

The present text surveys some relevant situations and results where basic Module Theory interacts with computational aspects of operator algebras. We tried to keep a balance between constructive and algebraic aspects.Comment: To appear in the Proceedings of the AADIOS 2012 conference, to be published in Lecture Notes in Computer Scienc

Quantum Geons and Noncommutative Spacetimes

Physical considerations strongly indicate that spacetime at Planck scales is noncommutative. A popular model for such a spacetime is the Moyal plane. The Poincar\`e group algebra acts on it with a Drinfel'd-twisted coproduct. But the latter is not appropriate for more complicated spacetimes such as those containing the Friedman-Sorkin (topological) geons. They have rich diffeomorphism groups and in particular mapping class groups, so that the statistics groups for N identical geons is strikingly different from the permutation group $S_N$. We generalise the Drinfel'd twist to (essentially) generic groups including to finite and discrete ones and use it to modify the commutative spacetime algebras of geons as well to noncommutative algebras. The latter support twisted actions of diffeos of geon spacetimes and associated twisted statistics. The notion of covariant fields for geons is formulated and their twisted versions are constructed from their untwisted versions. Non-associative spacetime algebras arise naturally in our analysis. Physical consequences, such as the violation of Pauli principle, seem to be the outcomes of such nonassociativity. The richness of the statistics groups of identical geons comes from the nontrivial fundamental groups of their spatial slices. As discussed long ago, extended objects like rings and D-branes also have similar rich fundamental groups. This work is recalled and its relevance to the present quantum geon context is pointed out.Comment: 41 page

The effects of an intronic polymorphism in TOMM40 and APOE genotypes in sporadic inclusion body myositis.

A previous study showed that, in carriers of the apolipoprotein E (APOE) genotype ε3/ε3 or ε3/ε4, the presence of a very long (VL) polyT repeat allele in "translocase of outer mitochondrial membrane 40" (TOMM40) was less frequent in patients with sporadic inclusion body myositis (sIBM) compared with controls and associated with a later age of sIBM symptom onset, suggesting a protective effect of this haplotype. To further investigate the influence of these genetic factors in sIBM, we analyzed a large sIBM cohort of 158 cases as part of an International sIBM Genetics Study. No significant association was found between APOE or TOMM40 genotypes and the risk of developing sIBM. We found that the presence of at least 1 VL polyT repeat allele in TOMM40 was significantly associated with about 4 years later onset of sIBM symptoms. The age of onset was delayed by 5 years when the patients were also carriers of the APOE genotype ε3/ε3. In addition, males were likely to have a later age of onset than females. Therefore, the TOMM40 VL polyT repeat, although not influencing disease susceptibility, has a disease-modifying effect on sIBM, which can be enhanced by the APOE genotype ε3/ε3

Equivariant cohomology over Lie groupoids and Lie-Rinehart algebras

Using the language and terminology of relative homological algebra, in particular that of derived functors, we introduce equivariant cohomology over a general Lie-Rinehart algebra and equivariant de Rham cohomology over a locally trivial Lie groupoid in terms of suitably defined monads (also known as triples) and the associated standard constructions. This extends a characterization of equivariant de Rham cohomology in terms of derived functors developed earlier for the special case where the Lie groupoid is an ordinary Lie group, viewed as a Lie groupoid with a single object; in that theory over a Lie group, the ordinary Bott-Dupont-Shulman-Stasheff complex arises as an a posteriori object. We prove that, given a locally trivial Lie groupoid G and a smooth G-manifold f over the space B of objects of G, the resulting G-equivariant de Rham theory of f boils down to the ordinary equivariant de Rham theory of a vertex manifold relative to the corresponding vertex group, for any vertex in the space B of objects of G; this implies that the equivariant de Rham cohomology introduced here coincides with the stack de Rham cohomology of the associated transformation groupoid whence this stack de Rham cohomology can be characterized as a relative derived functor. We introduce a notion of cone on a Lie-Rinehart algebra and in particular that of cone on a Lie algebroid. This cone is an indispensable tool for the description of the requisite monads.Comment: 47 page

A CFD-DEM solver to model bubbly flow. Part I: Model development and assessment in upward vertical pipes

[EN] In the computational modeling of two-phase flow, many uncertainties are usually faced in simulations and validations with experiments. This has traditionally made it difficult to provide a general method to predict the two-phase flow characteristics for any geometry and condition, even for bubbly flow regimes. Thus, we focus our research on studying in depth the bubbly flow modeling and validation from a critical point of view. The conditions are intentionally limited to scenarios where coalescence and breakup can be neglected, to concentrate on the study of bubble dynamics and its interaction with the main fluid. This study required the development of a solver for bubbly flow with higher resolution level than TFM and a new methodology to obtain the data from the simulation. Part I shows the development of a solver based on the CFD-DEM formulation. The motion of each bubble is computed individually with this solver and aspects as inhomogeneity, nonlinearity of the interfacial forces, bubble-wall interactions and turbulence effects in interfacial forces are taken into account. To develop the solver, several features that are not usually required for traditional CFD-DEM simulations but are relevant for bubbly flow in pipes, have been included. Models for the assignment of void fraction into the grid, seeding of bubbles at the inlet, pressure change influence on the bubble size and turbulence effects on both phases have been assessed and compared with experiments for an upward vertical pipe scenario. Finally, the bubble path for bubbles of different size have been investigated and the interfacial forces analyzed. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.The authors sincerely thank the ''Plan Nacional de I + D+ i" for funding the project MODEXFLAT ENE2013-48565-C2-1-P and ENE2013-48565-C2-2-P.Peña-Monferrer, C.; Monrós Andreu, G.; Chiva Vicent, S.; Martinez-Cuenca, R.; Muñoz-Cobo, JL. (2018). A CFD-DEM solver to model bubbly flow. Part I: Model development and assessment in upward vertical pipes. Chemical Engineering Science. 176:524-545. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ces.2017.11.005S52454517