Very interesting paper on raised fields and their physics (in English and Spanish).
Modelling nocturnal heat dynamics and frost mitigation in Andean raised field systemsJ.-P. Lhomme, J.-J. Vacher, Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 112 (2002) 179–193
The abstract is telling that the raised fields system is an old technique of soil and water management dating back to prehispanic time. Very common in the Lake Titicaca region, it essentially consists of a series of earth platforms on which crops are grown, surrounded by water canals connected to inlet and outlet ditches. A widely recognised benefit of this is its contribution to frost mitigation during the growing season. The paper presents a physical process-based model is presented to explain the role played by the canals in the nocturnal heat dynamics and the cold mitigation process. The model shows that greater heat flux emanating from the canals and greater water condensation on the crop both contribute to the mitigation effect.
La Mitigación de Heladas en Los Camellones del Altiplano andino, Bull. Inst. fr. études andines, 2003, 32 (2): 377-399, Jean-Paul Lhomme, Jean Joinville Vacher
Abstract: "El sistema de camellones o “waru warus” es una antigua técnica agrícola de manejo del suelo y del agua. En los tiempos prehispánicos era muy frecuente en la región del lago Titicaca. Consiste esencialmente en una serie de plataformas de tierra rodeadas por canales de agua. Las plantas se cultivan sobre las plataformas y el nivel del agua en los canales puede controlarse a través de entradas y salidas de agua. Un beneficio importante y ampliamente reconocido de este sistema de manejo en el altiplano es su contribución a la mitigación de heladas nocturnas durante la campaña agrícola. Con el objetivo de cuantificar este fenómeno y describir los procesos físicos responsables de la mitigación, se ha realizado un experimento en la región del lago Titicaca sobre un sistema de camellones cultivado con papas comparándolo con una parcela “testigo”
en la “Pampa”. Se presentan resultados experimentales que evidencian por una parte, el valor elevado de la temperatura del agua con respecto a la del cultivo sobre las plataformas, y por otra, una temperatura de cultivo siempre mayor (1-2 grados) en los camellones que en la Pampa. Conjuntamente se presenta un modelo mecanístico adaptado de un esquema de transferencia bicapa de tipo “Shuttleworth-Wallace” (una capa de vegetación y un sustrato de agua). El modelo precisa el papel que juegan los canales en la dinámica del calor y por lo tanto en la variación de la temperatura del cultivo durante la noche. El efecto de mitigación se debe al flujo de calor que emana del agua y a menudo también a la condensación del vapor de agua sobre las hojas del cultivo. Utilizando el modelo de manera predictiva, se muestra que canales más anchos o
plataformas más estrechas tienen un impacto positivo sobre la temperatura mínima del cultivo alcanzada durante la noche. Aumentar la profundidad del agua mejora también la mitigación de heladas, pero a la inversa, un canal más profundo (con el mismo nivel de agua) tiene un impacto negativo. Aumentar el índice de área foliar (LAI) o la altura del cultivo tiene un efecto positivo sobre la mitigación de heladas (el beneficio marginal, sin embargo, es muy pequeño cuando el índice foliar supera el valor 1). Mayor velocidad de viento o mayor humedad relativa incrementa también el efecto de mitigación de heladas."
http://www.ifeanet.org/publicaciones/boletines/32(2)/377.pdf
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Qocha
From the article, Los camellones alrededor del lago Titicaca, by Pierre Morlon, 2006.
The article is discussing the traditional agricultural methods used near Lake Titicaca; these methods are more than two thousands years old.
A "qocha" (small lake, lagoon) is an artificial pond used to gain water for cultivation. The text is telling that up to fifty years ago, waru-warus, camellones, qochas were much more extensive on the land but they were deliberately destroyed.
A qocha.
El sueño de la razón
Da Wikipedia
« La fantasía abandonada de la razón produce monstruos imposibles: unida con ella es madre de las artes y origen de las maravillas. » Goya, manoscritto conservato al museo del Prado.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Sugawara no Michizane
Sugawara no Michizane che cavalca un bufalo.
Utagawa Sadakage (attivo dal 1818-1844)
Sugawara no Michizane (845-903) venne divinizzato
come dio protettore delle lettere e della calligrafia.
Viene rappresentato spesso sotto fiori di susino a
cavallo di un bufalo, che lo accompagna durante
l'esilio dalla capitale.
Museo Arte Orientale
Hokusai manga - supernatural
The Hokusai Manga (北斎漫画) is a collection of sketches of various subjects by the Japanese artist Hokusai. Subjects of the sketches include landscapes, flora and fauna, everyday life and the supernatural... The Manga comprise literally thousands of images in 15 volumes, the first published in 1814, when the artist was 55. The final three volumes were published posthumously, two of them assembled by their publisher from previously unpublished material.
more Wiki
more Wiki
Museo Arte Orientale
World Wide Words: Rule of thumb
"The expression rule of thumb has been recorded since 1692 and probably wasn’t new then. It meant then what it means now — some method or procedure that comes from practice or experience, without any formal basis. Some have tried to link it with brewing; in the days before thermometers, brewers were said to have gauged the temperature of the fermenting liquor with the thumb ... This seems unlikely, as the thumb is not that sensitive and the range of temperatures for fermentation between too cool and too warm is quite small. It is much more likely that it comes from the ancient use of bits of the body to make measurements. There were once many of these: the unit of the foot comes from pacing out dimensions; the distance from the tip of the nose to the outstretched fingers is about one yard; horse heights are still measured in hands (the width of the palm and closed thumb, now fixed at four inches); and so on. "
World Wide Words: Rule of thumb
World Wide Words: Rule of thumb
Invisibility cloaks
Novel cloaking device makes 'larger' objects invisible, 20 April 2011 | By Andrew Czyzewski
"Researchers have developed a novel ‘cloaking carpet’ that is able to conceal objects far larger relative to its size than previous devices. Now, a group of researchers from Denmark and the UK has tested a novel metamaterial cloaking device that is only around four times the size of the object it was able to conceal....‘Instead of transforming the cloaked area to a point invisible to our eyes, a carpet cloak disguises the obstacle from light by making it appear like a flat ground plane,’ said Shuang Zhang of Birmingham University, who worked on the project alongside colleagues from Imperial College London and the Technical University of Denmark...The researchers used metamaterials, which are engineered to have optical properties not found in nature, but used a novel grating structure comprising a series of slits or openings to redirect a beam of light."
"Researchers have developed a novel ‘cloaking carpet’ that is able to conceal objects far larger relative to its size than previous devices. Now, a group of researchers from Denmark and the UK has tested a novel metamaterial cloaking device that is only around four times the size of the object it was able to conceal....‘Instead of transforming the cloaked area to a point invisible to our eyes, a carpet cloak disguises the obstacle from light by making it appear like a flat ground plane,’ said Shuang Zhang of Birmingham University, who worked on the project alongside colleagues from Imperial College London and the Technical University of Denmark...The researchers used metamaterials, which are engineered to have optical properties not found in nature, but used a novel grating structure comprising a series of slits or openings to redirect a beam of light."
Astronomical sensors for terrestrial use
QMC adapts astronomical sensors for terrestrial use, 19 April 2011 | By Andrew Czyzewski
"Highly sensitive astronomical sensors are being adapted for commercial, terrestrial uses in security, quality control and medical imaging. The technology, which is being developed by QMC Instruments, was originally used in space telescopes such as Plank and Herschel to peer into the far corners of the universe.
It focuses on terahertz radiation, the far infrared and microwave portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that astronomers use to study the Cosmic Microwave Background and dust clouds where stars are born.
In the past decade or so there has been increasing interest in producing and detecting terahertz radiation from terrestrial sources. Indeed, the latest generation of airport body scanners emit terahertz radiation at a defined frequency, which passes through clothes and to a lesser extent the body, but not metals.
However, the latest technology differs in that it is entirely passive, and is able to detect small amounts of terahertz radiation from endogenous sources such as the human body and certain objects such as explosives — essentially acting like a video camera, viewing the contrast in real time".
QMC adapts astronomical sensors for terrestrial use | News | The Engineer
"Highly sensitive astronomical sensors are being adapted for commercial, terrestrial uses in security, quality control and medical imaging. The technology, which is being developed by QMC Instruments, was originally used in space telescopes such as Plank and Herschel to peer into the far corners of the universe.
It focuses on terahertz radiation, the far infrared and microwave portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that astronomers use to study the Cosmic Microwave Background and dust clouds where stars are born.
In the past decade or so there has been increasing interest in producing and detecting terahertz radiation from terrestrial sources. Indeed, the latest generation of airport body scanners emit terahertz radiation at a defined frequency, which passes through clothes and to a lesser extent the body, but not metals.
However, the latest technology differs in that it is entirely passive, and is able to detect small amounts of terahertz radiation from endogenous sources such as the human body and certain objects such as explosives — essentially acting like a video camera, viewing the contrast in real time".
QMC adapts astronomical sensors for terrestrial use | News | The Engineer
Aymara language
AYMARA, 2,000,000 SPEAKERS in Bolivia, and Peru
from the DICTIONARY OF LANGUAGES, The Definitive Reference to more than 400 Languages, by
Andrew Dalby,A & C Black , London
"One of the AMERIND LANGUAGES, Aymara is spoken on the high Andes plateaus near Lake Titicaca. Aymara shows many similarities with neighbouring Quechua. An argument continues as to whether the languages have the same origin, or have grown together in the course of shared cultural development. Hermann Steinthal, at the 8th International Congress of Americanists in Berlin in 1888, asserted the former. J. Alden Mason, in the Handbook of South American Indians, argued that in their basis the languages had `little in common' but that they shared a large number of words,`perhaps as much as a quarter of the whole, obviously related and probably borrowed'. Some modern researchers favour Steinthal, positing a `Quechumaran' grouping to include both Quechua and Aymara; the majority, probably, agree with Mason. At any rate, there certainly has been cultural influence between the two.A hundred years before the Spanish conquest, Aymara territory had become part of the Inca empire. The west Peruvian dialects of Quechua show strong Aymara influence, as if Aymara had once been spoken there. The Aymara language has a traditional form of picture writing, used until quite recently to produce versions of Christian religious texts. This seems to represent an early stage in the typical development of writing - an aid to the memory, used for fixed texts such as catechisms and the Lord's Prayer, in which the texts are at least half-remembered. In this picture writing the characters are not standardised or used in the same way in different places. There are often fewer signs than words: just enough to recollect to the user's mind what he needs to say. The majority of signs are pictures of people and things.Some others are symbolic, and the meaning of signs can bestretched by means of puns and homophones. Aymara in this traditional script was at first written on animal skins painted with plant or mineral pigments: later, paper was used. In modern Bolivia, where the largest community of speakers is to be found, Aymara is now written in the Latin alphabet. The orthography, introduced in 1983, follows Spanish practice. Books and magazines are regularly published, notably by the Evangelical and Catholic churches. Many Bolivians are trilingual in Aymara, Quechua and Spanish. Thus, besides its Quechua elements, Aymara has now many Spanish loan-words, though they are much altered to fit the sound pattern: winus tiyas for Spanish buenos dias, wisiklita for bicicleta. The first ten numerals in Aymara are:
maya, paya, kimsa, pusi, phisqa, suxta, paqallqu, kimsaqallqu, llatunka, tunka."
from the DICTIONARY OF LANGUAGES, The Definitive Reference to more than 400 Languages, by
Andrew Dalby,A & C Black , London
"One of the AMERIND LANGUAGES, Aymara is spoken on the high Andes plateaus near Lake Titicaca. Aymara shows many similarities with neighbouring Quechua. An argument continues as to whether the languages have the same origin, or have grown together in the course of shared cultural development. Hermann Steinthal, at the 8th International Congress of Americanists in Berlin in 1888, asserted the former. J. Alden Mason, in the Handbook of South American Indians, argued that in their basis the languages had `little in common' but that they shared a large number of words,`perhaps as much as a quarter of the whole, obviously related and probably borrowed'. Some modern researchers favour Steinthal, positing a `Quechumaran' grouping to include both Quechua and Aymara; the majority, probably, agree with Mason. At any rate, there certainly has been cultural influence between the two.A hundred years before the Spanish conquest, Aymara territory had become part of the Inca empire. The west Peruvian dialects of Quechua show strong Aymara influence, as if Aymara had once been spoken there. The Aymara language has a traditional form of picture writing, used until quite recently to produce versions of Christian religious texts. This seems to represent an early stage in the typical development of writing - an aid to the memory, used for fixed texts such as catechisms and the Lord's Prayer, in which the texts are at least half-remembered. In this picture writing the characters are not standardised or used in the same way in different places. There are often fewer signs than words: just enough to recollect to the user's mind what he needs to say. The majority of signs are pictures of people and things.Some others are symbolic, and the meaning of signs can bestretched by means of puns and homophones. Aymara in this traditional script was at first written on animal skins painted with plant or mineral pigments: later, paper was used. In modern Bolivia, where the largest community of speakers is to be found, Aymara is now written in the Latin alphabet. The orthography, introduced in 1983, follows Spanish practice. Books and magazines are regularly published, notably by the Evangelical and Catholic churches. Many Bolivians are trilingual in Aymara, Quechua and Spanish. Thus, besides its Quechua elements, Aymara has now many Spanish loan-words, though they are much altered to fit the sound pattern: winus tiyas for Spanish buenos dias, wisiklita for bicicleta. The first ten numerals in Aymara are:
maya, paya, kimsa, pusi, phisqa, suxta, paqallqu, kimsaqallqu, llatunka, tunka."
Rogue Waves
"The storm was nothing special. Its waves rocked the Norwegian Dawn just enough so that bartenders on the cruise ship turned to the usual palliative — free drinks.
Then, off the coast of Georgia, early on Saturday, April 16, 2005, a giant, seven-story wave appeared out of nowhere. It crashed into the bow, sent deck chairs flying, smashed windows, raced as high as the 10th deck, flooded 62 cabins, injured 4 passengers and sowed widespread fear and panic."
From
"Rogue Giants at Sea", by W.J. Broad
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/11/science/11wave.html?8dpc
Then, off the coast of Georgia, early on Saturday, April 16, 2005, a giant, seven-story wave appeared out of nowhere. It crashed into the bow, sent deck chairs flying, smashed windows, raced as high as the 10th deck, flooded 62 cabins, injured 4 passengers and sowed widespread fear and panic."
From
"Rogue Giants at Sea", by W.J. Broad
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/11/science/11wave.html?8dpc
More on rouge waves at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_wave
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
World Wide Words: Action at a distance
"It first appeared in English in the word telescope. This was a usage adapted from Galileo’s Italian word telescopi for his new device, which he seems to have first used in 1611; two years later, Kepler employed the modern Latin telescopium. Galileo and Kepler apparently tried out a series of other names before settling on telescope, including perspicillum, conspicillum, specillum, and penicillium; if they had decided to use one of the others, it is very possible that we should now not have all these words starting in tele–."
World Wide Words: Action at a distance
Recovering the raised fields - Peru
Google Maps give beautiful pictures of the Earth. We have seen and shown in several posts that the satellite eye is able to display in great detail the archaeological remains and ruins. Let me show you here three images of some raised fields near the Lake Titicaca. These waru-warus (raised fields in Aymara language) are near Caritamaya.
According to a private communication (ConNuestroPeru), the archaeologists
are recovering some waru-warus having circular and radial shapes.
In fact, several waru-warus create geoglyphs featuring animals.
The "raised fields" are earthworks separated by canals. This is an ancient agricultural technique used by Andean people starting from the first millennium BC. Each raised field is approximately 10 meters large and more than one hundred long.
More on waru-waru
arXiv:1009.4602 [pdf] Geoglyphs of Titicaca as an ancient example of graphic design, Amelia Carolina Sparavigna
Monday, April 18, 2011
Moth-Eye Structures for Broadband Antireflection
Appl. Phys. Express 3 (2010) 102602 (3 pages) |Previous Article| |Next Article| |Table of Contents|
|Full Text PDF: FREE (763K)|
|Full Text PDF: FREE (763K)|
Hybrid Moth-Eye Structures for Enhanced Broadband Antireflection Characteristics
The authors are proposing hybrid moth-eye structures to have high antireflection propoerties. These structures can be applied to solar cells for high light -to-electricity cinversione efficiency
URL: http://apex.jsap.jp/link?APEX/3/102602/
DOI: 10.1143/APEX.3.102602
DOI: 10.1143/APEX.3.102602
Moth eyes for solar cells
"Photovoltaics, which convert sunlight into electricity, have long been touted as one of the most promising solutions to our energy needs. Unfortunately, today's devices reflect a lot of solar energy as heat, which means that solar power is currently not as cheap as other forms of energy. Now, however, researchers in the Netherlands have developed an anti-reflective coating based on the nanostructure of a moth’s eyes, which could reduce the reflection from photovoltaic cells and thereby make them more efficient"
Moth eyes inspire more efficient solar cell - physicsworld.com
The trash vortex
"The trash vortex is an area the size of Texas in the North Pacific in which an estimated six kilos of plastic for every kilo of natural plankton, along with other slow degrading garbage, swirls slowly around like a clock, choked with dead fish, marine mammals, and birds who get snared. Some plastics in the gyre will not break down in the lifetimes of the grandchildren of the people who threw them away."
The trash vortex | Greenpeace International
"Il Pacific Trash Vortex, noto anche come Grande chiazza di immondizia del Pacifico (Great Pacific Garbage Patch), è un enorme accumulo di spazzatura galleggiante (composto soprattutto da plastica) situato nell'Oceano Pacifico, approssimativamente fra il 135º e il 155º meridiano Ovest e fra il 35º e il 42º parallelo Nord. La sua estensione non è nota con precisione: le stime vanno da 700.000 km² fino a più di 10 milioni di km² ... ovvero tra lo 0,41% e il 5,6% dell'Oceano Pacifico. ... L'accumulo si è formato a partire dagli anni cinquanta, a causa dell'azione della corrente oceanica chiamata Vortice subtropicale del Nord Pacifico (North Pacific Subtropical Gyre), dotata di un particolare movimento a spirale in senso orario, che permette ai rifiuti galleggianti di aggregarsi fra di loro.
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Trash_Vortex
The trash vortex | Greenpeace International
"Il Pacific Trash Vortex, noto anche come Grande chiazza di immondizia del Pacifico (Great Pacific Garbage Patch), è un enorme accumulo di spazzatura galleggiante (composto soprattutto da plastica) situato nell'Oceano Pacifico, approssimativamente fra il 135º e il 155º meridiano Ovest e fra il 35º e il 42º parallelo Nord. La sua estensione non è nota con precisione: le stime vanno da 700.000 km² fino a più di 10 milioni di km² ... ovvero tra lo 0,41% e il 5,6% dell'Oceano Pacifico. ... L'accumulo si è formato a partire dagli anni cinquanta, a causa dell'azione della corrente oceanica chiamata Vortice subtropicale del Nord Pacifico (North Pacific Subtropical Gyre), dotata di un particolare movimento a spirale in senso orario, che permette ai rifiuti galleggianti di aggregarsi fra di loro.
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Trash_Vortex