A "sophist" or one who tries to live well and speak persuasivley (think clearly in the moment). "Sophist" has a bad wrap currently because of Plato's obvious disregard for them in his books (and our current regard for Plato) c/o wiki:
The Sophists certainly were not directly responsible for Athenian democracy, but their cultural and psychological contributions played an important role in its growth. They contributed to the new democracy in part by espousing expertise in public deliberation, since this was the foundation of decision-making, which allowed and perhaps required a tolerance of the beliefs of others. This liberal attitude would naturally have precipitated into the Athenian assembly as Sophists acquired increasingly high-powered clients.[9] Continuous rhetorical training gave the citizens of Athens "the ability to create accounts of communal possibilities through persuasive speech".[10] This was extremely important for the democracy, as it gave disparate and sometimes superficially unattractive views a chance to be heard in the Athenian assembly.
That we now know sophistry as the most desultory of practices is due to Plato and the Abstract, who vociferously abrogated Sophists (those following from a sensorial pragmatic). Democritus, ever the democrat, split the middle.
"A cladogram is a diagram used in cladistics which shows ancestral relations between organisms, to represent the evolutionary tree of life. Although traditionally such cladograms were generated largely on the basis of morphological characters, DNA and RNA sequencing data and computational phylogenetics are now very commonly used in the generation of cladograms". c/o wiki
"In nature, the rafts allow fire ants to survive epic rainstorms in their native Brazil. In the lab, they could help inspire designs for small, swarming robots that might someday be used to explore inaccessible areas or even clean up oil spills.
“The ant raft, up to this point, has been little more than just categorized and documented,” said mechanical engineer Nathan Mlot of the Georgia Institute of Technology, lead author of a paper in the April 25 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “We were coming at it from an engineering perspective.”
Even though ants’ exoskeletons naturally repel water, a lone ant dropped in a bucket will flounder. But whole colonies of fire ants can float downstream for weeks at a time when flushed from their underground nests. Mlot and his graduate advisor, David Hu, wondered what held the dense mass afloat — and whether it could be harnessed for other applications.
“How are the ants actually linking in the raft?” Mlot said. “We could speculate all we wanted, but the only way to know for sure was to get visual data.”
Mlot’s team collected thousands of fire ants (Solenopsis invicta) by roadsides in Atlanta, where the stinging pests are an invasive species. They immediately noticed that clumps of ants take on the consistency of soft playdough. Ant masses flow like honey or ketchup, and can be described using equations usually found in fluid dynamics.
“You could pick up a cluster of these ants and mold it in your hand. You could form it into a ball and toss it up in the air, and all the ants would stay together in one ball,” Mlot said. “They’re almost like a material.”
To set up a reproducible experiment, the team molded ants into balls by swirling them in a beaker. The ants’ natural tendency to stick together made them clump into near-perfect spheres.
Then the researchers placed balls of 500 to 8,000 ants into a water-filled filled container. Th ant sphere almost immediately relaxed into a flat, pancake-shaped raft, with ants on bottom forming a stable layer for the rest of the colony to rest on.
Surprisingly, the whole swarming mass remained delicately balanced atop the water’s surface. When the researchers tried to submerge the raft, water underneath deformed like a stretchy fabric, conforming to the raft’s underside contours.
Focusing on the details of this phenomenon, the researchers subjected their ants to a battery of bizarre tests. To measure how much force one ant could apply to another, they glued live ants to the bottom of a glass slide, then harnessed other ants to them with elastic bands. They painted ants with identification marks and charted their path across rafts. To investigate how the mechanics of raft formation in high resolution, they froze an entire ant raft in liquid nitrogen, then looked at it under a scanning electron microscope.
The images revealed that fire ants grip each other with their mandibles, claws and sticky pads at the end of their feet. Together, they form a tight weave similar to waterproof fabrics like Gore-Tex, which enhances the natural water-repelling properties of their bodies.
The team also built a simple mathematical model of raft formation. It might be used to inspire programs guiding cooperative robots.
“Robotics has often looked at insect communities for inspiration,” said roboticist James McLurkin of Rice University, who designs and builds robot swarms.
Roboticist Seth Goldstein of Carnegie Mellon University suggests that groups of small robots forming antlike rafts could be used to explore sewer lines or waterlogged caves. McClurkin even floated the idea, so to speak, of cleaning oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico.
As for Mlot and his ants, he didn’t lose any sleep over their fate. “After you get bit a couple of times, you lose your sympathy for them,” he said, adding that the experiments are simple enough that anyone can try them at home, “if they’re brave enough.”
Images & video: Nathan Mlot, Georgia Institute of Technology."
"The English language was first written in the Anglo-Saxon futhorc runic alphabet, in use from the 5th century. This alphabet was brought to what is now England, along with the proto-form of the language itself, by Anglo-Saxon settlers. Very few examples of this form of written Old English have survived, these being mostly short inscriptions or fragments.
In the year 1011, a writer named Byrhtferð ordered the Old English alphabet for numerological purposes.[2] He listed the 24 letters of the Latin alphabet (including ampersand) first, then 5 additional English letters, starting with the Tironian note ond (⁊) an insular symbol for and: A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X Y Z & ⁊ Ƿ Þ Ð Æ
The letters u and j, as distinct from v and i, were introduced in the 16th century, and w assumed the status of an independent letter, so that the English alphabet is now considered to consist of the following 26 letters: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
The variant lowercase form long s (ſ) lasted into early modern English, and was used in non-final position up to the early 19th century."
Please find below my thoughts on the best graph to represent the difference between my Epistemology and Abrahamic Religions (or my understanding of them).
A poem about Zippo lighters, who are the perfect embodiment of themselves. Whose simplicity of assembly, function, and use produce the quality which philosophy calls Telos. If we people Telos with human qualities of God, then within that heavenly place there must certainly be a Zippo for every Free Borne Man, that we could all participate in the quest for perfection, in the quest for the perfect embodiment and it’s self, and through it’s use: our selves. The manufacturing process of it’s body has been refined for so long through time that it has become a flawless element of my surroundings, it has become not only ubiquitous, it has become in-corporeal, The manufacturing process is a statement of art. This is How It’s Made, it is assembly lines of wooden match factories with classical music in the background. The items exist flawlessly in their surroundings, products of their elements, harmonies -- the bent and folded and stamped, and perforated and hinged body of the stainless steel. It is a good design when it can be manufactured in the millions anywhere in the world. So simple. Product of Design. The instructions and warnings are posted on the side of the interior piece, so they are not visible until you pull it out to refill -- they are stamped from raw steel, lightly into the site. They are of a “greater order” of possibility when compared to a bic lighter: misanthropic pieces of shit that everyone hates...at the store, while buying this Zippo Lighter, in fact, a fellow patron remarked that “it has been forever since she has seen a Zippo Lighter”, how she loved those damned things, compared to “those bic’s, man I lost so many of those ugly bics, with a zippo you can keep it”. I laugh. She says: “I am glad you are so happy, enjoy your zippo”. And this is the second time that a fellow patron in a convenience store had remarked to me at a store -- I mean: this was the second time I was in a convenience store within the last month, it was also the second time that our conversation had been focused on the celebration of the two well designed products of our modern culture: glass Coke Bottles and Zippo Lighters. Both interactions were about the other patrons memories, i.e “Man, it has been so long since I’ve drank coke from a bottle: I loved those thing, so cool and crisp: tastes so different from the glass.”, and involved their reminiscence. The only two interactions: this is how relevant design is in the world. Those things which are not Coke or Zippos, are not yet well enough designed: those buildings which are not yet as great as the Barcelona Pavilion, as flawless as the Farnsworth House are simply not being well designed. If the world around us were better designed, we would call it more positive words. This is Design: to efficiently structure a system of semiosys (acts and deeds) through time which are affirmative of your values at every step. Never compromising on one step of your products reality. Design is communication. Design is the system of signification which connects system together. It is the orchestration of material form through time, with eye to details at every step: from harvesting to disposal: being engaged and making the form of an object the result of an effect: a something "more" borne out of it's artful proof of existence: the Zippo saying: "yes I am a valid object: I am Art. There is very little that has hitherto been as well designed as a coke bottle and a Zippo lighter.
A good Coke Float is about the temperature of the coke bottle when it is brought to you on a platter, and the white towel that accompanies it, sitting on the ceramic bone china plate, with a bottle opener on the side. The other part of your float, a frosty glass stien, atop a similar towel and white plate, and a shiny metal spoon similar to the bottle open. A clean white table cloth.
"The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient mechanical computer[1][2] designed to calculate astronomical positions...Its time of construction is now estimated between 150 and 100 BCE.[4] "
"The degree of mechanical sophistication is comparable to a 19th century Swiss clock.[5]"
"in terms of historic and scarcity value, I have to regard this mechanism as being more valuable than the Mona Lisa"
