Giant Waterworld Around Naked Eye Star

Giant Waterworld Confirmed Around Naked Eye Star - Technology Review
"55 Cancri A is a Sun-like star some 40 light years away. It has an apparent magnitude of about 6 and so is visible to the naked eye in the constellation of Cancer.
This star is unusual in that it is just one of a handful that are known to have at least 5 planets. The innermost of these planets--55 Cancri e--was discovered in 2004 and has since had plenty of attention from astronomers. Various groups have observed the the changes in radial velocity that it causes its parent star. This tells them about that it orbits its star every 18 hours and that its mass is about 8 times Earth's or about half Neptune's."

"The innermost planet around 55 Cancri A is almost certainly an exotic waterworld with a radius about twice Earth's, say astronomers"

Mela, Pomponius

"Pomponius Mela, who wrote around AD 43, was the earliest Roman geographer. He was born in Tingentera (Algeciras) and died c 45 CE. His short work (De situ orbis libri III.) occupies less than one hundred pages of ordinary print. It is laconic in style and deficient in method, but of pure Latinity, and occasionally relieved by pleasing word-pictures. Excepting the geographical parts of Pliny's Historia naturalis (where Mela is cited as an important authority) the De situ orbis is the only formal treatise on the subject in Classical Latin."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomponius_Mela

Munich Digitization Center

Digitised works/ Author: Mela, Pomponius

http://www.digital-collections.de/index.html?c=autoren_index&l=en&ab=Mela%2C+Pomponius

Indos

"Sed praeter physicos Homerumque qui universum orbem mari circumfusum esse dixerunt, Cornelius Nepos ut recentior, auctoritate sic certior; testem autem rei Quintum Metellum Celerem adicit, eumque ita rettulisse commemorat: cum Galliae pro consule praeesset, Indos quosdam a rege Botorum dono sibi datos; unde in eas terras devenissent requirendo cognosse, vi tempestatium ex Indicis aequoribus abreptos, emensosque quae intererant, tandem in Germaniae litora exisse. Restat ergo pelagus, sed reliqua lateris eiusdem adsiduo gelu durantur et ideo deserta sunt."Pomponius Mela
De chorographia, Liber III

"Mais à l'autorité des anciens philosophes et d'Homère, qui ont prétendu que la terre était de tous côtés environnée par la mer, on peut ajouter celle de Cornélius Nepos, qui, étant plus moderne, est par conséquent plus sûr. Or, cet auteur rapporte, à l'appui de cette opinion , le témoignage de Q. Metellus Celer, auquel il fait dire qu'étant proconsul dans la Gaule, le roi des Botos lui fit présent de quelques Indiens , et que, s'étant informé d'où ils étaient venus, il apprit que, les tempêtes les ayant emportés loin de la mer des Indes, ils avaient été jetés, après un long trajet, sur les rivages de la Germanie. Le reste de la côte asiatique est donc baigné au nord par une mer sans bornes; mais cette partie est couverte de glaces éternelles, et par conséquent déserte."
Louis Baudet translation

To the ancient philosophers and Homer, who claimed that the land was surrounded on all sides by the sea, we may add Cornelius Nepos, who, being more modern, is therefore more reliable. However, this author reports in supporting this fact, the witness of Q. Metellus Celer: when he was proconsul in Gaul, the king of Botos  made ​​him a present of a few Indians, and that, being informed of where they came from, he learned that the storms have swept away them of the Indian Ocean. They were thrown, after a long journey, on the shores of Germania. The rest of the northern Asian shores are surrounded by the sea, but this part is covered with eternal ice, and therefore deserted.

King Arthur's round table

According to Telegraph, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/8724183/King-Arthurs-round-table-may-have-been-found-by-archaeologists-in-Scotland.html, 26 Aug 2011, King Arthur's round table may have been found by archaeologists in Scotland. In fact, the archaeologists  have found a "circular feature" beneath the historic King's Knot in Stirling. The King's Knot is a geometrical earthwork in the gardens below Stirling Castle. The design of the Knot that we see today dates from the 1620s, but its central mound could  be much older. It seems that some writers going back more than six centuries have linked the landmark to  King Arthur. Archaeologists from Glasgow University, working with the local Archaeological Society, found that the round feature on the site pre-dates the visible earthworks.

For a discussion on the King's Knot

see please "The orientation of the King's Knot of Stirling Castel" at

http://www.philica.com/display_article.php?article_id=549

How to measure the stair angle

According to the site of Duradek http://duradekmidatlantic.com/durarailchecklisthelp.html you can
use a protractor (available at most hardware stores) to determine this angle.

Lay a straightedge across a minimum of 3 stair nosings. Put your universal protractor on the straightedge and measure the angle. Note that the more stair nosings you have under the straightedge, the more accurate the angle will be. In the case that the run of stairs is very long, measure the stair angle at 2 or 3 places along the run to check that the angle remains constant along the full run.


I am proposing that Kha the architect at Deir El-Medina, Egypt, supervisor of the projects of three kings of the 18th Dynasty used his protractor to check the inclination of stairs for instance. You can see it at the Egyptian Museum of Torino. Read more at http://stretchingtheboundaries.blogspot.com/2011/08/khas-protractor.html

A modern universal protractor for building is that shown in the following figure.

Kha

 

Kha, the architect

Museo Egizio, Torino 

Back to Kha's protractor

In the post "Kha's protractor", I have discussed an object found in the tomb of  an ancient egyptian architect, Kha.  It can be used to measure angles.Plums, levels, protractors , compasses and so on are instruments for surveying. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveying and the table http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Table_of_Surveying,_Cyclopaedia,_Volume_2.jpg
In this table there is the image of a compass rose. We can start from it and go back to the Kha's rose.

Romans in America?

From the paper "History Mystery: Ancients in America", by Stephen Wagner, About.com Guide"Many of us learned that rhyme, part of a longer history poem, when being taught in school that Christopher Columbus discovered America. Although nothing can be taken away from Columbus' daring voyage, he certainly was not the first to arrive on the shores of the Americas. For one thing, there were already people here - many Native American nations inhabited what later became known as North and South America and even the Caribbean islands where Columbus landed. Columbus probably wasn't even the first "white man" to make it here. It's fairly well documented that Icelander Leif Ericsson successfully sailed to North America in the year 1000 - almost 500 years prior to Columbus's voyage.
In fact, there's a growing amount of evidence suggesting that a lot of the familiar history of human exploration and "discovery" by our ancestors as we were taught it may be quite wrong. There is hard evidence of ancient civilizations making their mark in places where, according to traditionally accepted history, they just shouldn't be. Here's an overview of some of the most remarkable and fascinating cases."
read more
At http://paranormal.about.com/od/ancientanomalies/a/History-Mystery-Ancients-In-America.htm

Fairy chimneys in Peru

Fairy chimneys in Peru , Amelia Carolina Sparavigna, Dipartimento di Fisica, Politecnico di Torino, Torino, Italy

The erosion of water and wind on the rocks is able to create beautiful landscapes. Some places are well-known and have been declared natural heritage sites by UNESCO; some others are in desert and hostile regions, hard to visit. In most cases, just the local population knows these landscapes. In this post we will see that the simple action of some users of World Wide Web services, such as the Google Maps, in uploading their pictures, allows the discovery, study and perhaps future preservation of some of them. We will see in particular the case of some fairy chimneys in Peru, in the district of Pampachiri, Apurímac.

Before talking about this Peruvian landscape, let us discuss briefly the nature of these rocky structures, tall and thin cusps of rock protruding from the land. They are named in several manners [1]. These pinnacles are considered as "tent rocks", "fairy chimneys" or simply "earth pyramids", according to their shapes. Another name is “hoodoo": at first sight, this name seems to be derived from "hood" because of the structure looking like a sort of "dwarf hat", but probably its etymology is different [2]. Hoodoo is the common term used to describe the rock chimneys found in the western United States and Canada.

The fairy chimneys consist of a relatively soft rock. Some of them have on the top a harder stone, less easy to erode: the result is a geological structure resembling that of a chimney. These structures typically arise within sedimentary rocks or volcanic formations. The height of these chimneys can be of tenths of meters. Their shapes are affected by the existence of different and alternate layers of materials having different strength. In some regions, there are the freezing of water and the gravity that are creating these structures. The process is known as "frost wedging". The water, that percolates in the cracks of rocks, freezes and then expands, acting as a wedge and breaking the rocks apart [1,3]. This is the same action chiseling the landscape of Dolomites, the mountain range located in northeastern Italy [4]. During the night, when the temperature goes below the freezing point, the water into the fractures of rock turns into ice. The corresponding expansion of volume increases the distance between the sides of fractures. During the day, the sun warms the rocks and water melts. So separated from the bulk, some parts of the rock fall for gravity. In the case that the fairy chimneys are made by tuff rocks from volcanic eruptions, the erosion is due to wind and rain. In Italy, there are several areas with gullies (calanchi) and pinnacles, chiseled by water and wind. Well-known are the Calanchi di Volterra in Tuscany, but several others interesting places are in Abruzzo [5].

Among the best-known landscapes having fairy chimneys, there is that of Cappadocia, Turkey [6]. Besides the importance of this geophysical area, the region is quite interesting because Cappadocians carved their homes into the soft rock (see Fig.1). During the medieval era, this area becomes a refuge for Byzantine Christians. The people established monastic settlements and churches inside the pinnacles. According to [6], the Göreme Open-Air Museum in Cappadocia has the best-preserved collection of chapels and houses, most dating about the 11th Century [7]. The life in Cappadocia was even more complex, because, due to the persecution, the local Christians often had to hide themselves. It seems that, alarmed by the hoof beats [6], they could abandon the caves in the pinnacles to find a refuge in the underground. Beneath the ground of Cappadocia, archaeologists found a network of subterranean villages, the largest discovered is almost 10 levels deep, with narrow passages among them [6-9].

Fig.1. Fairy chimneys in Cappadocia (picture by Zeynel Cebeci, of a site at Ürgüp - Nevşehir, Turkey).

Not only Cappadocia has some houses inside the natural chimneys. We can find them also in Peru, near Pampachiri and San Pedro de Larcay. This is a region having several interesting places for geophysical and archaeological researches. In fact, there is the archaeological site of Wallpa Wiri, having structures of Incas age [10,11]. Moreover, this region possesses a large structured system of carved stones, used as landmarks for agricultural purposes, system created in the Late Horizon period of Peruvian prehistory [11]. Analyzing this landscape within its agricultural and social context [11], the researcher provided evidence of water distribution and management of the irrigation cycles by the Incas; that is, there was an administration and management of the local agricultural processes by the central government. A survey of the region with Google Maps reveals the presence, at south-west of San Pedro, coordinates -14.178624,-73.592713, of several "qochas", ponds with a diameters of about 100 meters (see Fig.2).

Fig.2. Qochas near San Pedro. The average size is about 100 meters.

Linked together by a network of canals, qochas form a system of water and soil management [12]. This system is probably of pre-Incaic origin.

Unfortunately, the satellite map corresponding to this area has a limited resolution. However, Google Maps has an interesting feature: it is possible to drag the icon of the street view on the map and see if there are photos of the landscape uploaded by users. Doing this dragging, the location of the pictures appears as blue dots on the map (see Fig.3). In this manner, anybody using the map can have some information on the landscape corresponding to the specific location. There are no photos of the qochas of San Pedro, but many pictures of nearby locations, uploaded by Max Altamirano Molero [13]. Besides being very beautiful, the pictures display the existence of a forest of fairy chimneys. The location in the Pampachiri district is given in the map of Fig.3.

Fig.3. The position of San Pedro de Larcay, Peru, in the district of Pampachiri is given by the green arrow. The location of the fairy chimneys is given by the blue dots corresponding to the photo

Fig.4. The image shows a part of the very interesting set of images by Max Altamirano Molero. To see them, the reader can visit [13].

To the author’s knowledge, the pictures by Altamirano are among the best existing documentations of fairy chimneys in Peru . In fact, among the pictures that Altamirano has collected on a site (see Fig.4 and directly at [13]), several images are showing that some dwelling places have been obtained under or inside the fairy chimneys. It seems, as far as it is possible to gain from his pictures that a supporting structure of stones had built to reinforce the chimney (Fig.5). Only a local survey and analysis can tell how many and how old these structures are. For me, a physicist, it is also interesting to model their thermodynamic behavior, such as that of the chimneys in Cappadocia, to see if there are some thermal benefits in using them as houses.

In conclusion, we have seen that a fairy chimneys landscape exists in Peru, where some of the chimneys seem used as dwelling places. Moreover, the documentation of these remarkable structures is due to the activity of a Google Maps user, demonstrating that each user can help in the process of spreading the knowledge of existing cultural landscapes.

Fig.5. This image is adapted from a picture by Max Altamirano Molero, to show the importance of the pictures he collected. Note how the fairy chimneys had been transformed in a dwelling place.

References

1. Frank R. Spellman, Geography for Nongeographers, Government Institutes, 2010

2. www.scienceclarified.com/landforms/Ocean-Basins-to-Volcanoes/Plateau.html

3. How do you make a Hoodoo?, Bryce Canyon National Park,

 www.electronicfieldtrip.org/bryce/lessons/Lesson1.pdf

4. In August 2009, the Dolomites were declared a natural heritage site by UNESCO.

5. Roberto D’Andrea, Il Geosito dei Calanchi di Atri, Tesi di laurea, 2007, Università degli studi “G. d’Annunzio” di Chieti.

6. James Bainbridge, 30 May 2011, BBC, www.bbc.com/travel/feature/20110421-turkeys-land-of-fairy-chimneys

7. Spiro Kostof, Caves of God: Cappadocia and its Churches, Oxford University Press, 1989

8. Lyn Rodley, Cave Monasteries of Byzantine Cappadocia, Cambridge University Press, 2010

9. Thomas Krassmann, Unterirdische Städte in Kappadokien, http://www.mineral-exploration.com/mepub/kaymakli.pdf

10. Rocio Ferrel, ConNuestroPeru, private communication, 2011.

11. Frank Meddens, Rocks in the Landscape: Managing the Inka Agricultural Cycle, The Antiquaries Journal, 86, 2006, pp 36–65

12. Amelia Carolina Sparavigna, Qochas on Andean highlands, Archaeogate, May 5,  2011.

13. Photos by Max Altamirano Molero, in the Google Earth (KML), see also Panoramio, http://www.panoramio.com/user/4345310

Speed of neutrinos and cosmic consequences

Let me report a part of the discussion on the speed of neutrinos by Wikipedia
"In September 2011 the OPERA collaboration released calculations showing velocities of 17-GeV and 28-GeV neutrinos exceeding the speed of light in their experiments. The authors write, "Despite the large significance of the measurement reported here and the stability of the analysis, the potentially great impact of the result motivates the continuation of our studies in order to investigate possible still unknown systematic effects that could explain the observed anomaly." This result had not been detected by previous experiments, and lies in contrast to several others. For instance, photons and neutrinos from SN 1987A were observed to have an agreement in transit time to about 1 part in 450 million, with even this difference being accounted for by light being impeded by the material of the star early in its journey. The OPERA results, in contrast, suggested that neutrinos were traveling faster than light by a factor of 1 in 40,000, i.e. that neutrino speed is 1.0000248(28)c. Had neutrinos from SN 1987A (a supernova, approximately 168,000 light-years from Earth, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A) traveled faster than light by this factor, they would have arrived at Earth several years before the photons; this was not observed to be the case. However, neutrinos from the supernova had orders of magnitude less energy than the neutrinos observed in the OPERA experiment, as the authors point out."