The world's earliest accounts of
flying "machines" had been mentioned in the ancient
texts from India called the Vedas (Hindu poems), especially in the
Mahabharata, Bhágavata Purána and Rámáyana, by the name
of "vimana" (in some modern Indian languages the word for
"aircraft"), These craft could even travel in space as
there is the mention of a battle on the moon between two
craft. They were described in various shapes and sizes: cigar
shaped, blimp-like, saucer-shaped, triangular and double-decked.
(See: www.hinduwisdom.info and Wikipedia.)
The book: "A Dweller on Two Planets" (1894), describes a certain Atlantean cigar-shaped flying machine which resembles a modern passenger aircraft, though without wings and a tail. (Seen in the image right, from the book.) From its descriptions, it doesn't rely on aero-dynamic forces, but instead uses the forces that could be considered gravitational/anti-gravitational. Certain types of these machines were also able to travel under water like a submarine.
This flying machine is called a "vailx" (or Valix), and is also mentioned in the ancient Sanskrit texts from India as "vailix" ("vailixi" in plural form) as the flying craft of the Ashvins (gods). It is said that when the 18 year old author of "A Dweller on Two Planets" channeled this information, he could impossibly have known of these ancient Sanskrit texts. Also, besides some early experimentations, airplanes wouldn't been invented until the year 1899, at the time when the American Wright Brothers designed their first aircraft: a small biplane glider flown as a kite.
Quoting from page 75 of the book "A Dweller on Two Planets":
"Our vailx was of the middle traffic−size, these vessels being made in four standard lengths: number one, about twenty−five feet; number two, eighty feet; number three, something like one hundred and fifty−five feet, while the largest was yet two hundred feet longer than the third size. These long spindles were in fact round, hollow needles of aluminum, formed of an outer and an inner shell between which were many thousands of double T braces, an arrangement productive of intense rigidity and strength. All the partitions made other braces of additional resistant force. From amidships the vessels tapered toward either end to sharp points. Most vailxi were provided with an arrangement allowing, when desired, an open promenade deck at one end. Windows of crystal, of enormous resistant strength, were in rows like portholes along the sides, a few on top, and others set in the floor, thus affording a view in all directions."
"Aerial-submarine vessel entering the water".
(From "A Dweller on Two Planets".)
Besides the influence from the Sanskrit texts, in the book
there are also used words that are similar to words of Meso-American
languages (for example the word: "Incal"), Old Greek and
Latin. Not only the more frequent use of the character "x"
in words, but also the "-i" suffix in the plural form is
clearly present in both the Greek and Latin languages. The English
pronounciation of the word: "vailx" or "vailix"
is remarkably similar to the Latin word: "velox", from
which the "velocity" orginated. In modern language we could
perhaps translate "vailx" to a "speeder".
Also the book: "The Story of Atlantis" (1896), by William Scott-Elliot, clearly mentioned this kind of flying machines before the Wright brothers made their first succesful flight. Here they were called "air-boats" because their shape looked like a boat but without a deck. They would be able to travel around 100 miles per hour but only up to a height of a few hundred feet. First they existed from very thin wood but were later made of an alloy of light metals that made it sturdier and even lighter, and what looked white like aluminium. It could raise vertically and move horizontally due to a propelling force that was of an etheric nature, and that was guided from a generator in the middle of the ship to two flexible horizontal and eight fixed vertical tubes and exhaused through the same. The angle of the flexible horizontal tubes were controllable so that the angle of the propelling force could be changed. According to the book, its information is based upon clairvoyant research and apparently the information of the Theosophical Society. (This book is fully readable at: www.sacred-texts.com/atl/soa.)
In his readings, psychic intuitive Edgar Cayce mentioned ships that "sailed both in the air and under water":
entity then acted in the capacity of one who guided the ships that
sailed both in the air and under water; also was the maker of that
which produced the elevators and the connecting tubes that were used
by compressed air and steam and the metals in their
(From: Edgar Cayce Reading: 2157-1)
According to the material of Edgar Cayce, these ships were propelled from the ground by a power station that sent invisible rays to these ships that could get through everything. In other words, today we could say that the power was wirelessly beamed to them. Amidst the power station there was a special artifically crafted stone, called the "fire stone", and it was only known to initates for how to craft it.
American psychic intuitive Paul Solomon also mentioned and described these Atlantean flying machines in one of his "Source Readings" (reading #5, March, 1972). A small excerpt from the text:
this is Poseida, and this is fantastic. It’s like a different world
altogether because there are flying machines all over. I see so many
of them flying. Now you (Harry Snipes, the conductor) were a
pilot of a machine, a flying machine that worked in this way: the
power of this machine comes from two sources, from above and from the
earth side. There is a magnetism from the Sun or from the celestial
forces that draws upon the ship and there is magnetism from the earth
that draws upon the ship. These ships operate by creating a balance
between the two forces. Solar energy is used to counteract the
magnetism of the earth. The power that provides the thrust is on the
nature of what we would call a laser beam that operates through a
copper conductor that runs in two long channels along the base of the
ship. The ship has a shape like a long cylinder, no wings, only these
two runners along the bottom that appear as copper."
(Source with more info: www.wisdomofsolomon.com/psr73.phpl)
In the second part of this reading, Paul Solomon also mentioned another type of flying machine described as small winged aircraft:
I see another unusual flying machine. I don’t know where this is. I
assume this must be part of the Atlantean existence. This is a
one-man craft. It is ridden similar to the manner of the motorcycle
without wheels, but it has curved wings; that is, the wings extend
outward and curve downward at the tips, just slightly longer than a
man’s arms, maybe two feet longer on each side. Now these
machines are black; the legs of the man wrap around a cylinder which
produces the propelling force, but I see nothing of fire or smoke
vapor. This is an electro-magnetic force. It’s activated by a
copper core that runs about three quarters of the length. It appears
hollow in the back. It relates to another force on the other side and
they seem to develop some sort of polarity in relation to each other
to equalize pressure or magnetic force on both sides of the
the body would seem to be in direct contact with this core that runs
along the topside of the machine and the body is lying upon the
machine facing forward. The controls are operated by the hands
and fingers on either side of the machine as the arms reach around
the machine and forward. Now the protective shield in front of
the face again is not transparent, but would seem transparent from
the side on which the operator reclines, for it has a sensitive
screen that reveals images of that which it is approaching. They
seem to be capable of going high into space, somehow, with no harmful
effects to the rider."
This description sounds similiar to these enigmatic small objects (ca. 8-12 cm in length), dubbed by some as "golden airplanes" (seen in the images on the right), which originated from the Tolima Indians in Colombia, and are believed to be at least 1,500 years old. (Because they are made of gold, accurate dating is impossible.) Museums from Germany and Colombia who have these objects on display, claim these objects to be ficticious sculptures related to flying fish, insects and birds.
By closer inspection however, these seem to be models of machines build with advanced knowledge of technology and aerodynamics. These models appear to be equipped with both a horizontal and a vertical stabilizer and on some models we can even make out rudders and elevators, while other designs were built in a way that the stabilizers themselves could act as rudders and elevators. Further we can see what looks like a seat of a motor cycle; a wind shield, and cylinders which could be related to its way of propulsion. It seems to match quite well with the description that Paul Solomon gave about these flying machines, who assumed that these could have been part of the Atlantean existence.
Swiss author Erich von Däniken, especially known from his popular book: "Chariots of the Gods?" (1968), once undertook experiments to build scale models of these statues out of molden plastic, of about a meter in size, and only being powered by a front propellor. These models were being proven aero dynamic and able to fly through the air. (See this video: "The Mysterious World - Search for Ancient Technology", at 7:45.)
Trance medium Daan Akkerman mentioned in one of his readings that
those extraterrestrial "angels" (see the chapter: "Ancient
Scriptures") were able to manifest and dematerialize at
will, during the earlier times of Atlantis and before, and
were able to travel between time and dimensions of time, with the aid
of small airplane-like craft. Perhaps these "Golden Airplanes"
could have been imitations of these craft.
Eklal Kueshana, author of the book: "The Ultimate Frontier", described yet another type of Atlantean craft. He wrote in an article from 1996 that the vailixi were first developed in Atlantis around 18,000 BC. During this time, the most common ones had the shape of what we know today as a flying saucer:
shaped of generally trapezoidal cross-section with three
hemispherical engine pods on the underside."
"They used a mechanical antigravity device driven by engines developing approximately 80,000 horse power."
In her novel: "Tillbaka til Atlantis" (1991) ("Back to Atlantis"), Swedish medium and writer Mariana Stjerna also described oval shaped (saucer-shaped) Atlantean airships that could hang motionless in the air that were called - like in the Mahabharata - "vimana".
The chariot that had been witnessed and described by the Biblical prophet Ezekiel might have been such an saucer shaped craft. The description of "wheels within wheels" hints to a saucer shaped craft, the "eyes" that where inside the rings may have been exhaust ports or port holes and the crystal-like firmament (also translated as: "vault") above their heads sounds like a transparant dome on top of it. (See Ezekiel 1:1-28)
Edgar Cayce mentioned in his descriptions of Atlanean flying craft: "for the manners of transportation, the manners of communications were such as Ezekiel described at a later date" (Cayce 1859-1). According to trance clairvoyant Dr. Douglas James Cottrell, Ezekiel witnessed a "vehicle that would run by gravity and anti-gravity means". (See the video: "Ezekiel's wheel, the Garden of Eden, and the Dinosaurs' demise", by Rammsteinregeln.)
There were also four beings inside that craft that - because of their odd appearance and manner of movement - it seems that they could have been angelic beings which were possibly not from earth. Many Bible scholars believe them to be Cherubs; a certain class of angels. From Ezekiel 1:4-19:
"And I looked, and,
whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding
itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof
as the colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire.
Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance; they had the likeness of a man. And every one had four faces, and every one had four wings. And their feet were straight feet; and the sole of their feet was like the sole of a calf's foot: and they sparkled like the colour of burnished brass. And they had the hands of a man under their wings on their four sides; and they four had their faces and their wings. Their wings were joined one to another; they turned not when they went; they went every one straight forward. As for the likeness of their faces, they four had the face of a man, and the face of a lion, on the right side: and they four had the face of an ox on the left side; they four also had the face of an eagle. Thus were their faces: and their wings were stretched upward; two wings of every one were joined one to another, and two covered their bodies.
And they went every one straight forward: whither the spirit was to go, they went; and they turned not when they went. As for the likeness of the living creatures, their appearance was like burning coals of fire, and like the appearance of lamps: it went up and down among the living creatures; and the fire was bright, and out of the fire went forth lightning. And the living creatures ran and returned as the appearance of a flash of lightning. Now as I beheld the living creatures, behold one wheel upon the earth by the living creatures, with his four faces.
The appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the colour of a beryl: and they four had one likeness: and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel. When they went, they went upon their four sides: and they turned not when they went. As for their rings, they were so high that they were dreadful; and their rings were full of eyes round about them four. And when the living creatures went, the wheels went by them: and when the living creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up.
Whithersoever the spirit was to go, they went, thither was their spirit to go; and the wheels were lifted up over against them: for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels. When those went, these went; and when those stood, these stood; and when those were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up over against them: for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels. And the likeness of the firmament upon the heads of the living creature was as the colour of the terrible crystal, stretched forth over their heads above."
Also in the "Hakatha"; the"Laws of the Babylonians", there is the actual mention of flying machines and that they received the knowlegde of flight from "those from upon high" (?):
privilege of operating a
flying machine is great. The knowledge of flight is among the most
ancient of our inheritances. A gift from 'those from upon high'. We
received it from them as a means of saving many
Image from Nürnberg's newspaper from april 4, 1561.
(Full image with original article at wikimedia.org.)
On 14 april 1561, the newspaper of the city Nürnberg described a battle in the sky between fast moving balls, crosses and tubes (see image above). After about an hour these objects would have crashed to the earth, where they seemed to burn and finally crumbled on the ground with lots of smoke. At present day, this story is a popular example from ufos in the past, because nobody can explain for certain what actually happened here. The tubes in the depiction seem to look like vailxi, while the balls could perhaps represent flying saucers. The black arrow probably illustrates a compass needle that indicates north, to imply that the scene was witnessed in the eastern direction.
The futuristic looking Atlantean vailxi bear an uncanny resemblance to those kind of cigar-shaped UFOs which had been reported from as early as 1942 to this day. (See: www.ufoevidence.org) Maybe the earliest known official report of a similar object did come from the report by the crew of 61 Sqdn. Captain W/O Lever, during the raid on Turin, at the night of November 28/29th in the year 1942:
object was seen by the entire crew of the above aircraft. They
believe it to have been 200-300 feet in length and its width is
estimated at 1/5th or 1/6th of its length. The speed was estimated at
500 m.p.h., and it had four pairs of red lights spaced at equal
distances along its body. These lights did not appear in any way like
exhaust flames; no trace was seen. The object kept a level course.
The crew saw the object twice during the raid and brief details are
(Source: ufomystic.com. Is not online anymore.)
Could these sightings in any way have been related to those Atlantean craft? If yes, what could that possibly mean? Because the earliest official sightings were reported during the World War II, could it be that some of these Atlantean craft were found once earlier and are treated as a military secret? Could it be possible that these craft and other advanced knowlegde and technology came from a highly developed extraterrestrial civilization, like the earlier mentioned Martian people who would have fled to the earth? Because without advanced spacecraft it is not possible to travel from Mars to the Earth in a physical body of flesh and blood. (More about Mars in the chapter about Mars.)
Dutch trance medium Daan Akkerman explained in his book: "Lanto 1: Atlantis en ufo's" (2003), that UFOs could concern two different cases, namely: metaphysical visitations from far away dimensions and images from a reality outside our time, originating from the Lemurian age, which could become visible to man under certain ideal circumstances. Trance clairvoyant Dr. Douglas James Cottrell also gave nearly the same explanations for this phenomenon in his e-book: "Unexplained 1" (2013), in which he referred to the Atlantean vehicles that could travel both in the air as through the water by means of magnetic and anti-magnetic forces and explained these kind of sightings as coming into contact which what happened in the past. (Perhaps we could see it as a kind of energetic mirage from the ancient past.) Both Daan Akkerman as Dr. Cottrell decladed that there is no other physical extraterrestrial life within this universe, but there would however be other life in other dimensions and other universes.
Curious object in the middle of the picture.
In the year 2007, a story surfaced about a city and an ancient space ship on the far side of the moon (www.angelismarriti.it) from someone who called himself William Rutlegde and claimed to had been a member of the Apollo 20 crew. He posted some of his videos on his Youtube channel as the user: "retiredafb". While this story had been proved to be a hoax on the "Godlike Productions" forum (see: here), especially concerning the real identity of "retiredafb", and the fake city, it is still not known what this cylindrical cigar-shaped object is supposed to be (see above), as it is shown in official NASA images from the Apollo 15 and 17 missions. (See NASA Apollo 15 image 9625 and image 9630.)
It seems to be a very large object which seems to be sticking partly out of a crater. It also stands out quite a bit in the local surroundings. Because there aren't other large rocks in the neighbouring area, it may be nothing more other than a crashed asteroid. It looks pretty much like a cigar shaped Atlantean Vailix as described and pictured in Frederick S. Oliver's book, but for this object being a kind of spaceship may be considered improbable due to its supposedly enormous length of 3 to 5 km.
In any case we can not say that it is impossible to make flying saucers and such. On May 16, 2011, the Iranian press office Fars made it public that the government of Iran had created an actual flying saucer. The inventor, the Iranian nuclear physicist Mehran Tavakoli Keshe, explained that he had developed a special plasma reactor that could manipulate the field of gravity or magnetism to produce movement. Keshe had shared his knowlegde with governments around the world to make sure this technology could be widely applied on many fields and that it would not fall in the hands of a small number of people who could keep it for themselves and potentionally misuse it.


The Ebola public health emergency is over, WHO declares
West Africa's Ebola outbreak is not fully over, but the situation no longer constitutes an international health emergency, the World Health Organization said Tuesday.
The agency's director general, Dr. Margaret Chan, said the panel of outside experts that advises her on Ebola — the so-called Emergency Committee — has recommended that the outbreak no longer constitute a public health emergency of international concern.
Chan said she accepted the advice, a decision that attempts to draw a line under the worst Ebola outbreak the world has ever seen. More than 28,639 people — a previously unthinkable number — were infected and more than 11,316 of them died.
Despite the decision, one of the three countries at the heart of the outbreak, Guinea, is still in a state of high alert because of a recent cluster of five confirmed cases and three probable cases.
Chan said such flare-ups of cases will persist, given the number of survivors in West Africa. Evidence now suggests some men who have survived Ebola can emit the virus in their semen for over a year.
Professor Robert Steffen, vice chair of the Emergency Committee, said all the original chains of transmission in the original outbreak have now been cut.
The outbreak is believed to have begun in Guinea in December 2013. The outbreak was announced in March 2014 but was only declared a public health emergency of international concern by the WHO in August 2014.


For adults learning a language, there’s really no escaping the fact that we have to memorize vocabulary. There are various ways to make the process more efficient or enjoyable (like flashcards, or labeling your house), but in the end, it’s still memorizing. So, given our limited time and memory, it would be nice if we could see into the future and just spend our time learning only the words we’ll need first and then move on to the next words, etc. But it doesn’t work like that. We have to prioritize ourselves and ask:
“What words should I learn now?”
The Proactive Approach
One way to figure out what you should learn is to try to predict what situations you’ll be in and what vocabulary you’ll want to use. For example, Ben Ross described to me his way of learning Chinese in China:
“Say I needed to go to the bank to transfer money…I ask a Chinese friend all the words and phrases which might come up, learn them, possibly practice it out, and then go to the bank.”
That’s an excellent way to get useful vocabulary into your brain. I find this approach much more useful than following a book or teacher’s idea of what you should learn next. But it requires imagination. Even in the earliest days of learning Chinese, I was thinking thoughts like, “Ok, I’ll be in China and see Chinese people and I’ll want to be able to greet them or thank them when our paths cross.”
The problem with the proactive approach is, for me at least, that I often have no guarantee I’ll actually ever use what I’m learning. I have a tendency to get lost in the dictionary and start learning things that will yield very small (if any) linguistic returns in real life (like the word for “elbow”). This is bad because I run out of time and energy and sometimes movitvation.
The Reactive Approach
Another way to increase your Chinese vocabulary is to learn the words you just needed but didn’t have. For example, if you go out shopping and realize you wanted to say, “Can I have another bag?” but didn’t know how, you can write down the English phrase in your field notes and rush to your informant and find out how to say it in Chinese: qǐng zài gěi wǒ yí gè dàizi 请再给我一个袋子.
Or, on the listening comprehension side, if you have Chinese-speaking friends who are patient enough to stop every time you don’t understand what they say, you can write down those new words and come home and learn them. That’s exacty how I wrote the list of the measure words Chinese people really use. I didn’t memorize the list in the back of Chubby and then go looking for them being used in real life. I simply didn’t understand a measure word when I heard it, then learned it.
For me, the reactive approach is the best in terms of motivation. In other words, there’s no question of why I’m learning certain words. The downside is that uncomfortable time where I don’t understand what someone said or don’t know how to say something. But I’ll shake the hand of the language learner who can avoid those times completely.
Of course a combination of proactive and reactive learning is best. But how to balance the two and where to commit your time and energy has to be up to you. This is one of those messy bits of learning a language where there’s really no right answer. It’s easy to feel like you’re not being proactive enough, or simply not being active enough. The “should” phrases tend to crop up. For example you might tell yourself, “I should have known that” or “I should be better by now.” But as long as you’re learning, moving forward, and doing what you feel like doing, shouldn’t that be enough?
See also the other posts in this series:


When galaxies collide
An Australian student astronomer has discovered evidence of a vast collision between two giant clusters of galaxies.
The finding changes astronomers' views of how clusters and individual galaxies evolve.
"Space is big. The chance of things running into each other is small," said Professor Ron Ekers, Director of the Australia Telescope National Facility. "Until now there has been only weak evidence that clusters might collide."
Such collisions may also create ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, the origin of which has been a mystery.
The research will be discussed today at a workshop on galaxy clusters at the Australia Telescope National Facility headquarters in Sydney.
Ms Johnston-Hollitt has been studying a cluster of about 500 galaxies called Abell 3667 about 700 million light-years away. Clusters are big groups of galaxies held huddled together by gravity.
Abell 3667 appears to be a large cluster that has run into a slightly smaller one. The key evidence is a pair of arcs of radio emission that straddle the cluster, 12 million light-years apart. The arcs are the same distance apart as about twice the diameter of the Moon as seen in the sky.
Ms Johnston-Hollitt described the collision and its aftermath as like "the Titanic hitting an iceberg".
"Afterwards you see only ripples and bits of wreckage, but that's enough to show that there's been a collision."
Radio arcs of the kind seen in this cluster are very rare. The first ones found were thought to be ghostly remains of dead, dissipated galaxies, and were dubbed relics.
Professor Ron Ekers is one of the people who worked on the first known examples of these objects. "It's very satisfying to see that these are markers of important dynamic processes," he says, "not the Cheshire-cat grins of dying galaxies."
Theorists had predicted that galaxy clusters would free-fall together at thousands of kilometres a second, smacking into each other and producing huge shock waves in the thin hot gas that fills the space between the galaxies.
In 1999 researcher Kurt Roettiger, then of University of Missouri-Columbia, and colleagues demonstrated that the shock waves would produce large arcs of radio-emitting particles on the outskirts of the cluster, like those of Abell 3667.
"The Australia Telescope picture is the first high-resolution image of such a radio structure" said Ms Johnston-Hollitt.
Cluster collisions release the largest amounts of energy in a single event since the Big Bang. They might explain one of the outstanding mysteries in astronomy: the origin of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, which amazed astronomers and physicists when first detected on Earth. "No process in our Galaxy can make them," said cosmic ray researcher Dr Roger Clay from the University of Adelaide. "Perhaps shock waves in merging clusters power them up."


Improve Your Projects with Problem Definition and …
Feb 22, 2018 · Improve Your Projects with Problem Definition and Solution Definition. February 22, 2018 by. Jonathan Browne. Project Management, in layman’s terms, is how organizations or individuals solve problems. Project Management could essentially be renamed “Problem Solving”, and Project Managers, “Problem Solvers”. Therefore, it is not surprising two key stages in project management are Problem Definition and Solution Definition.
DA: 60 PA: 22 MOZ Rank: 93


Definition of isotherm
n. - A line connecting or marking points on the earth's surface having the same temperature. This may be the temperature for a given time of observation, or the mean temperature for a year or other period. Also, a similar line based on the distribution of temperature in the ocean. 2
The word "isotherm" uses 8 letters: E H I M O R S T.
No direct anagrams for isotherm found in this word list.
All words formed from isotherm by changing one letter
Browse words starting with isotherm by next letter


Most functions used for branching, such as < and string?, produce either #t or #f. Racket’s branching forms, however, treat any value other than #f as true. We say a true value to mean any value other than #f.
This convention for “true value” meshes well with protocols where #f can serve as failure or to indicate that an optional value is not supplied. (Beware of overusing this trick, and remember that an exception is usually a better mechanism to report failure.)
For example, the member function serves double duty; it can be used to find the tail of a list that starts with a particular item, or it can be used to simply check whether an item is present in a list:
|> (member "Groucho" '("Harpo" "Zeppo"))|
|> (member "Groucho" '("Harpo" "Groucho" "Zeppo"))|
4.7.1 Simple Branching: if
In an if form,
(if test-expr then-expr else-expr)
the test-expr is always evaluated. If it produces any value other than #f, then then-expr is evaluated. Otherwise, else-expr is evaluated.
(and expr ...)
(or expr ...)
|> (got-milk? '(apple banana))|
|> (got-milk? '(apple milk banana))|
If evaluation reaches the last expr of an and or or form, then the expr’s value directly determines the and or or result. Therefore, the last expr is in tail position, which means that the above got-milk? function runs in constant space.
Tail Recursion introduces tail calls and tail positions.
4.7.3 Chaining Tests: cond
(cond [test-expr expr ...+] ...)
Each test-expr is evaluated in order. If it produces #f, the corresponding exprs are ignored, and evaluation proceeds to the next test-expr. As soon as a test-expr produces a true value, its text-exprs are evaluated to produce the result for the cond form, and no further test-exprs are evaluated.
The last test-expr in a cond can be replaced by else. In terms of evaluation, else serves as a synonym for #t, but it clarifies that the last clause is meant to catch all remaining cases. If else is not used, then it is possible that no test-exprs produce a true value; in that case, the result of the cond expression is #<void>.
The full syntax of cond includes two more kinds of clauses:
(cond cond-clause ...)
cond-clause = [test-expr then-expr ...+] | [else then-expr ...+] | [test-expr => proc-expr] | [test-expr]
The => variant captures the true result of its test-expr and passes it to the result of the proc-expr, which must be a function of one argument.
|> (after-groucho '("Harpo" "Groucho" "Zeppo"))|
|> (after-groucho '("Harpo" "Zeppo"))|
A clause that includes only a test-expr is rarely used. It captures the true result of the test-expr, and simply returns the result for the whole cond expression.


For centuries the Hellenes had busied themselves with the technai, the crafts, and specifically the endeavour to mimic the handiworks of their gods, the twelve Olympians. In classical myth the god responsible for the crafts was Hephaestus, the lame son of Hera. He was, amongst other things, a goldsmith, an armorer, a builder, an architect, a worker in bronze, and an inventor of mechanical devices or automata. Some of the most awe-inspiring and formidable implements used by the Olympian gods and goddesses were ensouled by Hephaestus’s abyssal and multi-coloured imagination. These include, but are not exclusive to, the grand Olympian palace, Helios’ gilded chariot, Hermes’ winged petasos and helmet, the girdle of Aphrodite, Eros’s bow and arrows, as well as the weaponry of famous Trajan heroes like Achilles and Heracles. More significant feats were the assembly of automatons as personal assistants, the fabrication of indestructible and immortal dogs to serve a divine master in Alcinous, King of the Phoenicians, and the fabrication of a Herculean man of bronze named Talos whom he placed on Crete to patrol the shore and safeguard Europa, a Phoenician princess loved by Zeus, from hostile foreign adversaries.
The Greeks perceived their gods to be immortal versions of themselves, and so the traits of this god were transposed to the legendary figure of the craftsman Daedalus. Better known for his construction of a Cretan labyrinth to harbour the dreaded Minotaur and a wooden cow used as a contraption for Queen Pasiphae to mate with a white bull, Daedalus’ quirky and admonitory inventions included automata of every type and description. In his De anima Aristotle (384–322 bce), the preeminent polymath of classical thought, makes mention of a Daedalian creation–a mobile simulacrum of the goddess Aphrodite whose movement could be attributed to a quantity of quicksilver that lay inside. Some of Daedalus’ inventions were even employed as props by Aeschylus and Euripides in their satirical plays to illustrate points about the nature of reality. What the Greeks sought to illuminate through these tales of clever imitation was that the human intellect partakes of the divine intellect because it can successfully and convincingly replicate anything it sees in the natural world.
Save for being a product of the marriage of the technical crafts with Greek philosophy in an Alexandrine milieu that was as deep and complex as it was variegated and broad, Western alchemy was the discipline that best captured the Hellenistic plight to perfect and compete with Nature herself. It appropriated many of the ideas that were around at the time–speculative nature science, Stoic philosophy, Gnostic soteriological notions of purification and illumination via contemplation, Egyptian symbolism of the Osirian rebirth cycle–and in doing so offered a new point of reference pertaining to perspectives on the nature of matter through which the relationship between the ethereal and material, the divine and corporeal, and the natural and artificial could be scrutinized. Alchemy was different from the Hellenistic and Egyptian technai of metallurgy, glass-making, pottery, chemistry, dyeing, jewellery-making, and generating lifelike automata because it went beyond the cosmogony of superficial imitation to a perfective one in which a different atomic structure could be imposed onto the existing blueprint of a created object or substance, thus altering its inherent “form”. Adopting the role of a secondary or inferior deity, the alchemist could fashion gemstones, metals, elixirs and other products by first reducing them to primal chaos or prima materia in a manner reminiscent of God’s creation ex nihilo, an act of creating something out of nothing. This fanciful list of natural replication would later evolve to encompass artificial procreation in the homunculus, a rudimentary proto-cloning of human beings with biotechnological consequences and ethical concerns much more relevant now than what they were back then.
Even though the origins of Western alchemy are ambiguous, ill-defined and shrouded in mystery, we must attempt at least a superficial demarcation of its development in Hellenistic Egypt for the sake of pinpointing which Hellenistic ideas it entered into dialogue with and when this might have transpired. Nevertheless, what is clear beyond reasonable doubt is that prior to its confluence with Hellenistic philosophy, the proto-alchemy of the Egyptian Late Period was closely related to the chemical arts and the metallurgical crafts which sought to counterfeit precious stones and dyes. Hence in its formative stage, a historian of science or Western esotericism would not be wrong in claiming that alchemy was purely a mimetic endeavour. According to Andre-Jean Festugiere (1898–1982), the French philosopher who descried a threefold division of surviving historical documents pertaining to alchemy, this initiatory period of the discipline’s evolution lasted until about 200bce and conceived of technical prescriptions purely in a mechanical and quantitative manner. Such is obviously the case with the Leyden X and Stockholm papyri which give a plethora of instructions for the counterfeiting of gold and the synthetic replication of silver, pearls, and textile dyes. The trajectory of its outlook allegedly changed between 200bce and 100ce, when substances, metals, and natural processes were understood in light of qualitative animistic interactions; everything that exited in the cosmos was arranged or configured according to the polar forces of “love” and conflict”, which forged “sympathies” and “antipathies” between individual objects or substances. Festugiere argued that this phase was embodied par excellence by Bolus the Democritean’s (c. 200bce) alchemo-mystical treatise Physika kai Mystika, though it is now contested that the text in question dates to the first centuries ce and was probably reworked a number of times. Finally, the fragmentary works of Gnostic alchemist Zosimos of Panopolis (c. 300ce) complete the implanting of Hellenistic philosophy into the chemical technologies of ancient Egypt. The dream-like visions described at length in Visions transcribe purifications of the soul and Nature in Gnostic and Stoic terms, drawing attention to the notion that alchemy was a viable avenue through which Nature and the human soul, both of which had their origin in the prima materia, passed through a cosmic distillation apparatus in order to emerge regenerated from their fallen and accursed state.
Scholars of Western Esotericism today believe that the feasibility of transmutational endeavours indigenous to the discipline of ancient alchemy is only discernible in the context of Aristotelian nature philosophy. While this may be true, concepts vital to an Aristotelian teleology hinged on the relationship between “matter” (“hyle”) and “form” (“eidos”) are no doubt cogitations of earlier Greek thought. The most important of these is the ubiquitous prima materia, a synonym for what the ancients understood as the undifferentiated first matter from which everything in the corporeal world was made and to which it would eventually return. The alchemists themselves believed that transmutation as a world-creating and self-actualization process was impossible without a return to the primordial state of Oneness. They were also convinced that the virginal, unformed essence of the soul and unactualized matter were both projections of the prima materia, and prima materia was often equated with the culmination of the opus, the ultima materia or Philosopher’s Stone. Thus for a base substance or “soul” to be transmuted into silver and gold it had to be reduced to its primal state first. This marked a formative stage in the alchemical opus known as necrosis or nigredo in which the old form or matter putrefies, dies and is supplanted by a much purer and virginal one that ignites from its ashes. As both the matrix and fruition of the Stone, it seems natural that the prima materia would be imbued with epithets that are variegated yet qualitatively linked: moon, sea, mother, mercury, water, earth, virgin, menstrue, poison, chaos, water, dew, and hyle.
So where exactly did the idea of an underlying interconnectedness for the universe, the insinuation that all is One, actually come from? The Greeks have always been a curious and seafaring peoples, and there is ample evidence to suggest that they were travelling to Egypt as early as the eighth and seventh centuries bce. Their adventures in the land of the Nile would have brought them face to face with the Egyptian priesthood, and a great many Greek travellers would have been entrusted with intimate details of the Heliopolitan creation myth. The state myth makes use of a dramatic metaphor to descry how the universe came into being. It speaks of a primeval ocean of undifferentiated mass called Nun which existed for time immemorial before its self-generated vortices pushed up a mound of fertile silt. In turn, the silt differentiated into a conscious and self-engendered creator god who proceeded to masturbate and ejaculate a pair of substances, air and moisture, from whence all created matter emerged. Being of an overtly curious and investigative disposition, the early Greeks would have brooded upon the homogenous substance of un-creation which the Egyptians defined as primeval chaos (χάος).They would have wanted to tear aside the metaphoric veil and know its true nature, an obsession which bamboozled the Ionian pre-Socratics for centuries on end.
Smyrna-born poet Homer (c. 850bce) stayed faithful to the Egyptian conception, describing the primordial substance as “River Ocean, a deep and mighty flood, encircling land and sea like a Serpent with its tail in its mouth.” A pictogram of this image would appear much later in an eleventh century Hellenistic manuscript together with the slogan hen to pan, the notion that everything is one. Thales (c. 630-546bce), on the other hand, visualized a flat earth floating atop a base substance which resembled a vast and desolate ocean. He too aligned himself with the view put forth by the Egyptian creation myths and Homer. A pupil of his, Anaximander of Miletos (c.610-546bce), called it the apeiron, a term which means “boundless” and recalls the mutability of water. Anaximenes (584-28bce), also of Miletos, was the first philosopher to initiate a departure from the established convention, visualizing the base substance of the cosmos as a kind of vapor or air but not of the physical type. Meditating on the problem at hand, he reasoned that condensation of the primal substance produced physical air, water and earth while its rarefaction formed fire. His emphasis on transformation of one substance into another formed the foundation of Empedocles of Acragas’ (ca. 490-430bce) doctrine of the elements which was henceforth absorbed into Aristotle’s nature philosophy. Of all pre-Socratic philosophers it was a contemporary of Anaximenes in Heraclitus of Ephesus (535-475bce) that probably came closest to what many contemporary esotericists believe to be true. Seeing that the active mover behind the rotation of the elements is fire, it made sense to him that the underlying cause of all phenomena must be an ethereal fire of sorts.
In his instructional poem On Nature, a philosophical work written in hexameter, Empedocles made an important contribution to Aristotelian nature science regarding the doctrine of the elements. Unlike the pre-Socratics who believed that each element was a primary substance in its own respect, Empedocles posited that it was the prima materia that differentiated into the four elements under the influence of four auxiliary qualities. It should be evident that the four elements in question are not to be confused with the four corporeal manifestations of the same name; they are merely principles comprised of immutable corpuscles that enable the prima materia to take on innumerable guises whilst remaining fundamentally unchanged. Hence many centuries afterward, the compressed summa or compendium of alchemical knowledge presented in the enigmatic Tabula Smaragdina or Emerald Tablet under the aegis of the legendary Hermes Trismegistus could staunchly claim that the Stone’s father is the solar orb (also Fire or Philosophical Sulphur) and its mother the lunar orb (also Water or Philosophical Mercury). Conversely the wind or Air would be implicated as the womb which carried it and the volatile and moist humus that is Earth would be cast in the presiding role of wet nurse.
In the aforementioned cosmogony, Fire, an active, masculine principle with a propensity to rise, is dry and hot. Air, also an active, masculine principle but with a tendency to expand, is hot and wet. Alternatively, the feminine, passive principle of Water is wet and cold because of its inherent nature to expand and drop while Earth, also of the same cut as water but characterized by a condition of solidity that causes it to drop towards the naval of the earth, is cold and dry. Each element shares a secondary quality with two others, aligning them into an eternal cycle known as elemental rotation where a succeeding condition is potentially latent in an existing one. As had been posited by Heraclitus the only active mover in this assembly is Fire, an element whose physical constituent spurs the protean transformation of chemical water from a liquid to a gas and whose absence enables its transition back into a liquid and a solid. By this virtue, it made perfect sense to the ancient alchemists that the underlying cause of phenomena, the manifestations of the noumenal world, as well as the inner workings of Mother Nature whose ways could be observed through chemical processes like calcination, coagulation, distillation, sublimation, and dissolution, could all be attributed to the subtle action of fire.
This brings us to the genius of Plato. In following century-old premises brooded upon by Ionic pre-Socratics, Plato borrowed their vision of the world as a living creature along with Anaximenes’ vision of the First Cause as an ethereal fire and married them with Pythagorean mystical insights that defined the First Cause in strictly qualitative and geometric terms. If the uncreated was a spherical speck of light or fire which mysteriously took on a plethora of forms when it differentiated into other substances and qualities, and if everything that had been created was interconnected and infused with the same life force which emanated from the primeval time origin, then the obvious deduction would be to conceive reality as being two-fold; somewhere out there existed a world of Eternal Ideas, Forms, and Archetypes that stood apart from and underpinned the visible world of “becoming” or created Nature. Time and space, qualities of the latter, separated the two dimensions.
Further speculations were then made within the framework of an animistic ontology, placing the earth under the mediation of a Universal Soul (psyche) which united the human soul in its virginal state with the web of the cosmic animal that was Nature. The latter is a philosophical shard that blatantly recalls the famous Hermetic adage, “As Above, So Below”. Both the universal and the human psyche were superior and inferior reflections of a Universal Spirit (nous) that stood above them on the cosmological totem pole and espied the first cogitation, a primeval and benevolent act of self-love that was God. Directly beneath the Universal Soul was the earth and below that the formless hyle, the prima materia. Western alchemy would use logic proceeding from the threefold hypostasis of the Platonic cosmos to forge connections between the sickly metals of the mineral realms and the chaotic human soul seeking unio mystica with the Godhead, both having to be purged of their “sickness” and restored to an original state of perfection if the true essence of Spirit in all its glory (i.e. gold) was going to shine through. In hindsight, it appears that alchemy’s theoretical deduction of the existence of God, the animistic context through which it operates, the idea of a transcendental realm, the relationship between macrocosm and microcosm, and much of its terminology derive explicitly from Platonic metaphysics.
At this point it should also be mentioned that Neo-Platonic philosophy exerted a profound influence on practical aspects of the alchemical process, though it wasn’t until the sixteenth century that manuscripts circumscribing this confluence come to light. Strictly speaking, the Neo-Platonic cosmos was merely a system of orthodox Platonism that congealed under Plotinus (205-70ce), a Greek-Egyptian from the Deltaic Lycopolis in Lower Egypt. His closest disciple and biographer, the Lycian-born Porphyry (232-305ce) consolidated and amplified a cosmological system whereby the Aether-filled spheres of the seven planets and the four Empedoclean elements of the earth separated Man from the Empyrean of God and the primum mobile, an etheric substance which permeated space and facilitated the heavenly rotation. It’s likely that the sevenfold astrological schema through which incarnating souls picked up their rudimentary character traits was extended to the corresponding metals.
Hence when alchemists relayed details of practical work, they could speak of it in the context of a three or four coloured division that was underpinned by a sevenfold schema; the Saturnine, Jovial and Lunar forces lunarized the base matter by initiating chemical processes such as calcination, solution and putrefaction which brought about nigredo and albedo in the sealed vessel. Successful completion of latter bestowed upon the alchemist the gift of the “white stone”; the power of healing and of transmuting base matter like lead or mercury into silver. Further operations were then carried out by Venusian, Martian and Solar forces which solarized the just formed “white stone” through chemical reduction, sublimation, coagulation and fermentation. These subsequent reactions in the sealed vessel or glass brought about citrinitas and rubedo, culminating in the synthesis of a glittering red powder of significant weight known as the “red stone”; this was the ultima materia or Philosopher’s Stone, with the power to transmute base metals to gold and impart immortality. The creation of the “white stone” under the aegis of the first three planetary powers comprised what alchemists termed the Lesser Work and the creation of the “red stone” under the aegis of the last three the Greater Work. Mercury, a planet-metal that would have comprised the preliminary stage, was never ascribed a definitive position in its own right because it was considered to be the formative force behind the entire alchemical opus.
Perhaps the single most influential aspect of Hellenistic philosophy on alchemical theory was conferred by Plato’s student Aristotle (384–322 bce), who amplified the teleological concern of Platonic cosmogony. His hierarchical schema of higher purposes tended to define created matter, an individual object or substance, in terms of four primary quotients including the material, the formal, the efficient, and the final. The first two relayed its material composition and unique anatomical configuration, the third attempted to delineate the moving force behind it, whilst the fourth and last had to make do with the ultimate purpose for its existence, a principle that had been programmed into the individual object or substance by the Platonic prototype that existed in the higher essential world of Forms and was itself a thought of God. According to Aristotle, everything that incarnated on the corporeal plane came equipped with a congenital nisus, an intrinsic desire to become the Platonic Form existing in the Empyrean of God upon which it had been modeled. In this eternal cycle of change to be understood as a see-saw interaction between fiery activity or “form” and passive potentiality or “hyle”, the baby desires to become a full-grown human, the egg a chicken, the seed a tree, the caterpillar a butterfly, and the element carbon a diamond. There were far-reaching implications for the mineral kingdom under the mediumship of such logic; base metals weren’t the monolithic, inert or dead reagents they appeared to be but ensouled embryos in variant stages of gestation deep in caves and pockets of the earth that comprised the subterranean womb of the Great Mother Goddess. Measured against gold, a metal that was perceived to be the material reflection of the immaterial, spiritual prototype of God, the other six know metals were essentially embryonic gold that had yet to ripen. This was the natural process which the alchemist sought to accelerate under artificially simulated conditions.
We see a confluence of many pre-Socratic, Platonic, and animistic ideas surrounding minerals and metals in Aristotle’s Meterologica. In this particular treatise the Stagirite argues that the material occupying the space taken up by the primum mobile and the planetary spheres wasn’t the four earthly elements but an indivisible, incorrupt and previously unidentified fifth substrate known as “Aether” or the “quintessence”. This was one and the same with pneuma or transcendental Spirit. He also lays bare the proposition that the inhabitants of the subterranean kingdom all originated from exhalations of moist “watery vapor” and dry “earthy smoke” deep in the loins of the earth. Those that could be dissolved, a category including gold and the imperfect metals, were comprised of the wet substrate while those impermeable and resistant to change like fossils and rocks were creations of the dry one. When the Arab polymath Jabir ibn Hayyan (c. 721-815) described the growth of metals in the Liber misericordiae of the Corpus Jabirianum (8th- 10th century) some eleven centuries afterward, he connected the first of Aristotle’s exhalations to Sulphur, the active principle of flammability and combustibility, and the second to Mercury, the principle of fusibility and volatility. Jabir believed that the shape and physiognomy of metals corresponded to two qualities that were incongruent to the two prevailing qualities of their internal matter. Each metal congealed under the aegis of a particular planetary power acting upon a marriage or coniunctionis between Mercury, consisting of the passive elements of Water and Earth, and Sulphur, consisting of the active elements of Fire and Air. This was known as the Sulphur-Mercury theory, a model that would go on to dominate Western alchemy until the development of phlogiston theory in the latter stages of the seventeenth century. Alternatively, in his renowned medieval alchemical treatise Summa perfectionis, the Latin Geber (ca. 1200) claims that exaltation of the Philosopher’s Stone was feasible because Mercury was composed of minute corpuscles that would induce transmutation by diffusing through the perforated exterior of a base metal, an idea that was influenced by the Aristotelian idea of “least parts” as described in Physics and Meterologica.
The Stagirite’s speculations encompassed far-reaching consequences for the aurific art by strategically positioning it on a pedestal of eternal feasibilities that would precariously balance between poles demarcating the good and the evil, the genuine and the fraudulent, and the natural and the artificial for centuries to come. In his Physics, Aristotle differentiates between the artificial and the natural by illuminating the former’s condition of inertness and the latter’s proclivity towards motion and change. He then explicates (at Physics II 8 199a15-17) the nature of mimesis by positing that artificial intervention on the part of the artist can either replicate the prototype or blueprint without changing its inner composition (mimetai), or more importantly, accelerate the entelechies of formed matter or substances in ways which violate the teleological cycle (epitelei). In his treatise Meterologica, Aristotle uses verbs associated with the artificial activity of cooking like “roasting” and “boiling” to implicate that both the technical operations seeking to mimic natural processes and that the natural processes themselves are reflections of one another, fundamentally the same. Over and beyond the fact that these words constitute women’s work, an synthetic activity that was used to describe the synthesis of the Philosopher’s Stone by Michael Maier (1568–1622) and some of the later alchemists, the couching of a natural process in artificial terminology betrays Aristotle’s conviction that artificial methods could still generate a natural product.
The first union between Greek natural philosophy and the “proto-scientific” technical recipes occurred during the life and times of Bolus the Democritean, an active Pythagorean who lived in the Deltaic Egyptian city of Mendes during the second century bce. Known for his mystical approach to the artisanal crafts, Bolus wrote a rather lengthy alchemical treatise entitled Physika kai Mystika of which only segments have survived. While revealing a deep preoccupation with both the physical and paraphysical, Bolus’s work delineates a process whereby a base substance or the prima materia, usually lead or mercury, is used to prepare gold, the Great Work or Philosopher’s Stone. In this, the earliest known prototype of metallic transmutation, transformation and exaltation of the “stone” is marked by four distinct phases of colouration that serve as exoteric markers of a deduction process instigated by the laws of cosmic sympathy and antipathy. Thus the “stone” or noble metal is conferred form only after undergoing putrefaction through melanosis (nigredo), bleaching through leucosis (albedo), yellowing through xanthosis (citrinitas) and finally reddening through iosis (rubedo). Purple sometimes takes the place of red in the last of these stages, hinting at the spiritual ennoblement bubbling directly beneath a chemical process which Bolus no doubt understood as changes to colour and properties that went beyond that of the superficial.
The full grafting of Hellenistic philosophy onto the technical and chemico-operative prescriptions of the proto-alchemical period in Egypt is clearly discernible in the work of the Gnostic Zosimos who tended to view alchemy as a soteriological method whereby Nature as a whole could be transformed. In his fragmentary commentary titled On Virtue, Zosimos describes a series of dream-like visions and accompanying interpretations in which he implicitly alludes to the idea that the intangible principle of zestfulness, colour, character, distinctiveness, and ensoulment that is the pneuma (Spirit) can be separated from its corporeal prison through ordinary evaporation processes like sublimation and distillation. His clever use of metaphor to draw parallels between base metals and human beings; between the distillation apparatus and temples and altars; and between the liberation of the spirit-soul from the human body and the transformation of the volatile substance in base metals is intentional and draws attention to corresponding processes of creation reflected in the Divine Intellect or the One.
Proceeding from these symbolic correspondences, a secondary dream transcribed in “Visions” involving the ritual torture, punishment (kolasis) and death of a horde of men inside an alchemical flask can be equated with the liberation of pneumata from their restrictive matrix through heat and the application of corrosives, their purification with rudimentary transformation into a nobler form, and the resurrection or reanimation of their mutilated bodies the crystallization of a new form. Zosimos first discusses this alchemical allegory in the context of individual reagents before augmenting his parameters to include created Nature as a whole. He postulates that success in transmutation is entirely contingent on the individual alchemist, who, in seeking success must permit for Nature (physis) to be “forced to the investigation” (ekthlibomene pros ten zetesin) by regressing to a primordial state of confusion and suffering (talaina) where her instinctual reaction will be to assume variant intermediary states of being until she wafts closer and closer to death. Only through this arduous trajectory can she ever hope to multiply her conscious and become more pneumatic. According to Zosimos, the manipulation of the invigorating life principle or pneuma and its reintegration with the lifeless physical base through these practical techniques resulted in genuine transmutation.
Several sections in the thirteen opusules of Zosimos’s Authentic Memoirs deal with distillation equipment in a pneumatic capacity. He describes several apparatuses intended for sublimation; numerous multi-piped alembics fashioned from glass and fitted with clay or terracotta stems that were used for either distillation or the fixation of mercury; and a sophisticated, cylinder-like vessel called a kerotakis. As an implement of sublimation the last of these was especially significant because it facilitated changes in colouration and properties that were no doubt construed as a genuine recombination of pneuma and body. The kerotakis tower was a closed vessel comprised of three cubicles: a lower compartment in which the material to be sublimed was placed, a perforated plate near the top of the vessel on which a lead of metal or ore was placed, and a hemispheric cap which collected the vapours. Sublimation was performed by fixing a substance, usually arsenic sulphide, mercury, or sulphur, on the lowermost compartment directly above a burning furnace and letting the vaporous fumes react with the metal or ore resting on the middle of the plate. Once the fumes reached the hemispherical lid on the top they would condense into liquid and sluice their way back to the compartment containing the liquefied substance. Eventually, the sublimate would infuse itself into the metallic base rendering modifications to external colours and patinas that were perceived by Zosimos to be fundamental changes in the structure of matter.
In retrospect, the imitative arts have a very long and illustrious history in Western civilization. Irrespective of their innate gravitation towards a particular craft, all artists were primarily interested in the amalgamation of synthetically fabricated features that either rivalled that of their natural prototype or excelled over it. For Plato, Plotinus, and the Neo-Platonists, there was an immaterial world of Forms, a realm of being that stood apart from and underpinned the sphere of created Nature or “becoming”. The fundamental principles of time and space separated the two worlds; time set forth the wheel of change, and change was understood to mean an adherence to the cycles of birth, growth and death which enabled everything natural to strive for perfection, to seek its ultimate “form”. Assuming the role of a miniature Demiurge, an artist could replicate natural products through mimesis. Often the products themselves would be impressive and aesthetically pleasing yet they lacked the intrinsic principle of movement and the inner qualities that characterized their prototypes. An example par excellence of the counterfeiting of natural products like gold and silver as well as natural dyes and precious stones pervades the technical prescriptions of the Leyden X and Stockholm papyri, both of which represent a mechanistic or “exoteric” proto-alchemy.
Later, when the alchemical writings fused with the philosophical musings of the Greeks and above all the nature philosophy of Aristotle, the Hermetic Art reorientated itself in the Alexandrine world as a techne that could modify the underlying structure of matter and hence influence teleology. By the time Zosimos of Panopolis (c. 300ce) started writing his twenty-eight volume corpus which encompassed his own innovative insights and earlier texts, alchemy was no longer just a perfective and chemical operation seeking to create the ultima materia, the worldly panacea, or gold. It was a dual art imbued with a redemptive and mystical soteriological aspect in which the human soul, also prima materia, forged a new personality for the alchemist and in doing so mirrored the torture of matter in the alembic as it was purified, cleansed, and refined through repeated cycles of solve et coagula. One could argue that this, a techne that sought to perfect the embryo-forms in the womb of the earth by causing them to ripen prematurely, to spiritualize the human body and spur an embodiment of the Spirit most typical of illumination, constituted the last of a series of stages in the evolution of ancient alchemy that was inherited by the Arabs and the Christian West. Alongside medicine, alchemy claimed an illustrious and exalted place in the hierarchy of ancient technai by claiming to recapitulate the processes of creation in whole and down to the last bit of detail. The production of stones, metals, substances, powerful elixirs, and even human life itself, actions that had originally stemmed from divine cogitation itself, were now viable and seduced people from all areas of intellectual inquiry as well as those who styled themselves alchemists. Of course, none of it would have been possible had alchemy not borrowed its authoritative looking glass from Greek philosophy.
 Edith Hamilton, Mythology (New York City, NY: Little, Brown and Company, 1969), pp. 36.
 Katerina Servi, Greek Mythology (Athens, GR: Ekdotike Athenon, 1997), pp. 50.
 Sarah P. Morris, Daidalos and the Origins of Greek Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 217-223.
 Bernard, D. Haage, ‘Alchemy II: Antiquity-12th Century’, in Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, ed. by Wouter, J. Hanegraaff, Antoine Faivre, Roelof van der Broek, and others, 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 2005), I, pp. 22.
 The passive, receptive, unformed basis known as the hyle from which all matter, be it immaterial and of the soul or material and of the world, is formed.
 Bernard, D. Haage, ‘Alchemy II: Antiquity-12th Century’, in Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, ed. by Wouter, J. Hanegraaff et al., 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 2005), I, pp. 28.
 Stanton J. Linden, The Alchemy Reader: From Hermes Trismegistus to Isaac Newton (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 46-49.
 Ibid, pp. 46-49.
 Ibid, pp. 38.
 Joseph L. Henderson and Dyane N. Sherwood, Transformation of the Psyche: The Symbolic Alchemy of the Splendor Solis (East Sussex, UK: Routledge, 2003), pp. 9.
 Albert de Jong, ‘Zosimus of Panopolis’, in Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, ed. by Wouter, J. Hanegraaff, Antoine Faivre, Roelof van der Broek, and others, 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 2005), I, pp. 1185.
 Titus Burckhardt, Alchemy: Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul (Shaftesbury, UK: Element Books, 1986), pp. 97.
 Lindy Abraham, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 156.
 Michael Rice, Egypt’s Legacy: The Archetypes of Western Civilization 3000-30bc (London, UK: Routledge, 1997), pp. 178-179.
 Lorna Oakes and Lucia Gahlin, Ancient Egypt (New York City, NY: Hermes House, 2002), pp. 301.
 Charles Mills Gayley, The Classic Myths in English Literature and Art (Boston, USA: Adamant Media Corporation, 2005), pp. 3.
 Bernard, D. Haage, ‘Alchemy II: Antiquity-12th Century’, in Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, ed. by Wouter, J. Hanegraaff, Antoine Faivre, Roelof van der Broek, and others, 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 2005), I, pp. 18.
 Emile Brehier, The History of Philosophy: The Hellenic Age (Chicago, USA: University of Chicago Press, 1965), pp. 208.
 Stanton J. Linden, The Alchemy Reader: From Hermes Trismegistus to Isaac Newton (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 28.
 Titus Burckhardt, Alchemy: Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul (Shaftesbury, UK: Element Books, 1986), pp. 94-95.
 Ibid, pp. 116.
 Ibid, pp. 115.
 The Heart of Plotinus: The Essential Enneads (Perennial Philosophy), ed. by Aldis Uzdavinys (Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, 2009), pp. 248.
 Titus Burckhardt, Alchemy: Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul (Shaftesbury, UK: Element Books, 1986), pp. 185-189.
 Ibid, pp. 189-191.
 Andrea Falcon, ‘Aristotle on Causality’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2011/entries/aristotle-causality/> [Accessed 24th May].
 Joseph L. Henderson and Dyane N. Sherwood, Transformation of the Psyche: The Symbolic Alchemy of the Splendor Solis (East Sussex, UK: Routledge, 2003), pp. 5.
 Bernard, D. Haage, ‘Alchemy II: Antiquity-12th Century’, in Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, ed. by Wouter, J. Hanegraaff, Antoine Faivre, Roelof van der Broek, and others, 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 2005), I, pp. 19.
 Allison P. Coodert, ‘Alchemy IV: 16th-18th Century’, in Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, ed. by Wouter, J. Hanegraaff, Antoine Faivre, Roelof van der Broek, and others, 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 2005), I, pp. 42.
 Ibid, pp. 42.
 Aristotle, Meterologica, ed. and trans. H.D.P.Lee (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), IV 381B3-9.
 Stanton, J. Linden, The Alchemy Reader: From Hermes Trismegistus to Isaac Newton, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 38.
 A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths About Science, ed. by Noretta Koertge (New York City, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 221.
 Ibid, pp. 221.
 Les Alchimistes Grecs: Zosime de Panopolis, ed. and trans. by Michele Mertens (Paris, FR: Les Belles Letres, 1995), pp. 4:130-152.


Posted by Kelsey on .
We are learning Indirect object pronouns and I need help with the following questions.
Traduce las frases al espanol.
11. He asked her for more money.
12. I gave you your present.
13. She bought you a new dress.
14. He prepared dinner for us.
15. Musicals fascinate me.
16. She's lacking (missing) silverware.
17. We loved that soap opera.
18. The singer's voice (la voz) bothered them.
19. It doesn't matter to you.
20. Going for a stroll with you doesn't interest me.
If you are learning indirect-object pronouns, that usually means that you have already had the direct object pronouns. Here's a review: Eng. & Spanish.
INDIRECT OBJECTS DIRECT OBJECTS
me (to, for, at, from me (me)
te (to, for, at, from te (you,fam/sing)
you - fam/sing)
le (to, for, at, from lo (it, him)
him, her, you form) la (it, her)
nos (to, for, at, from nos (us)
os (to, for, at, from os (you = fam/pl)
you = fam/pl)
les (to, for, at, from los (them) masc
them, you-all form)las (them) fem
Now, look closely and you can see that you don't even have to understand the grammar to pick everything except 3rd person singular and plural. THAT is where you must understand that the indirect-object MUST have either stated OR understood one of these words: to, for, at, from. Now let's look at the sentences. I'll do #11 for you and then you try the rest, which I shall check for you later.
#11. = He asked her for more money. STOP. WHAT did he ask for? money = the direct object = he asked (past tense) for IT. NOW, WHOM (objective case because HE is the subject) did he ask? her Restate it and you get "He ask for the money FROM her." "her" must be the indirect-object pronoun.
Put it all together, and when you get to sentences with BOTH the direct and indirect, notice that I listed the Indirect BEFORE the Direct.
El le pidió más dinero.
Think you understand it? Try "walking through asking WHAT & from/of WHOM" to easily identivy what you are working with!


|Camper, N - CLEMSON UNIVERSITY|
Submitted to: CRC Press
Publication Type: Book / Chapter
Publication Acceptance Date: July 1, 1998
Publication Date: N/A
Interpretive Summary: This book chapter consists of a review of general concepts and principals that are common to naturally occurring agrochemicals and pharmaceuticals. Specific discussion focuses on a few important chemicals isolated from plants that have antifungal, insecticidal or anticancer activity. Also, fatty acids involved in signally defense related responses in plant and animal are discussed. Information presented in this chapter supports further investigation of plant-based chemicals for new agrochemicals and pharmaceuticals and future development of alternative agricultural crops for nontraditional uses.
Technical Abstract: Antibiotics, antineoplastics, herbicides, and insecticides often originate from plant and microbial defense mechanisms. Secondary metabolites once considered unimportant products are now thought to mediate plant defense mechanisms by providing chemical barriers against animal and microbial predators. This chemical warfare between plants and their pathogens consistently provides new natural product leads. Whether one studies toxins, herbicides or pharmaceuticals, chemical compounds follow basic rules of pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics. Chemical properties of a molecule dictate its cellular and physiological responses and organisms will act to modulate that chemical response. Discovery and development of new biologically derived and environmentally friendly chemicals are being aggressively pursued by leading chemical and pharmaceutical companies. Future successful development and approval of these new chemicals will require knowledge of their common mechanisms in toxicology and pharmacology regardless of their applications to plants or animals.


Test of Phonological Awareness - Second Edition PLUS - TOPA 2 PLUS
Author(s): Joseph K. Torgensen, PhD / Brian R. Bryant, PhD
- Ages: 5 through 8 years
- Testing Time: Kindergarten--30-45 min.; Early Elementary--15-30 min.
- Administration: Group or individual
- Norm Referenced
- Qualification Level B
The TOPA-2+, a revision of the popular Test of Phonological Awareness, is agroup-administered, norm-referenced measure of phonological awareness for children ages 5 through 8 years. The scale, which can also be administered individually, has demonstrated reliability and the test yields valid results that are reported in terms of percentile ranks and a variety of standard scores (e.g., scale scores, Normal Curve Equivalents) that can be selected based on the preference of the examiner and the purpose for which the results are to be used (e.g., identification; reports to local, state, or federal agencies). The TOPA-2+ has twoversions, a Kindergarten version and an Early Elementary version, that measure young children's ability to (a) isolate individual phonemes in spoken words and (b) understand the relationships between letters and phonemes in English. The latter skill was not assessed by the original TOPA and is the reason the PLUS was added to the title.
One version, the Kindergarten TOPA-2+, can be administered any time during the kindergarten year but is likely to be most sensitive to individual differences during the second half of the year. This version uses two different item types to assess phonemic awareness. Ten Initial Sound-Same items require children to mark which of three words begins with the same sound as a target word. Ten Initial Sound-Different items require children to mark which word in a group of four words begins with a different first sound than the other three. A child's total score for phonemic awareness is the number correct on each item type added together. The Letter-Sounds subtest requires children to mark which letter, from a set of four, corresponds to a specific phoneme. The subtest has 15 items, and the child's score for the test is the total number correct.
The Early Elementary version of the TOPA-2+, for children in first and second grades, is similar in structure to the kindergarten version, except that the child must identify final sounds in words, which is a more difficult task. The 10 Ending Sound-Same items requires children to identify which of three words ends with the same sound as a target word, while the 10 Ending Sound-Different items asks children to mark which of a group of four words ends in a different sound than the others. As with the kindergarten version, the number correct on both item types is summed to get one total score for phonemic awareness. The Letter-Sounds test for the Early Elementary version requires children to spell simple pseudowords that are given as the names of "funny animals." The words vary from two to five phonemes in length, and they are all single-syllable. The child's score is the total number of words spelled correctly.
The TOPA-2+ was normed on 2,085 students from 26 states; 1,035 for the Kindergarten Version and 1,050 for the Early Elementary Version. The sample is representative of the United States across several key demographic variables (i.e., geographic region, gender, race, ethnicity, family income, educational attainment of parents). The TOPA-2+ manual provides evidence of internal consistency reliability, test-retest reliability, and interscorer reliability; all of which meet or exceed .80 across all ages. Evidence is also provided for content-descriptive validity, criterion-prediction validity, and construct-identification validity. The manual also provides evidence that the TOPA-2+ subtests are nonbiased in regard togender, race, and ethnicity.
Major improvements in this edition:
1. All new normative data were collected during the years 2002 and 2003.
2. Characteristics of the normative sample with regard to age, geographic region, gender, race, residence, Hispanic ethnicity, family income, and parents' education are keyed to the 2000 census data projections and therefore are representative of the current U.S. Population.
3. The normative data for geographic region, gender, race, and residence have been stratified by age.
4. Studies showing the absence of culture, gender, race, and disability bias have been added.
5. Reliability coefficients have been computed by age and separately for males, females, Euro-Americans, African Americans, and Hispanic Americans, and those with language and learning disabilities, as well as for the entire normative group.
6. All new validity studies have been conducted; these studies show clearly that the test results are valid for a wide variety of mainstream and minority subgroups, as well as for the general population.
7. Some items from the original scale were changed to less offensive words and pictures.
8. Letter-sound correspondence subtests were added to it which adds substantially to the predictive accuracy of early screening for reading difficulties.
9. The overall look of the test has been updated and improved.
Administration and Scoring
The TOPA-2+ may be group or individually administered in 1545 minutes, depending on the age of the child. Scores are reported as scaled scores, standard scores, percentile ranks, or normal curve equivalents.


There's an interesting thread on Searle's use of the bamboo pen over at the Illustration Art blog, suggesting Searle first dicovered this tool as a prisoner of the Japanese during WW11. The variety of mark-making in Searle's work indicates that he uses a variety of tools, nibs, fountain pens brushes etc.
Artists often wonder how did Searle achieve those marvellous results- what tool did he use? The answer is probably all of them. In this photo below from the display case at the Cartoon Museum's Searle exhibition we can see the different media he used, including a bamboo pen, a variety of dip pens, the wood stain used as ink early on & the famous Mont Blanc fountain pen.


The Malagasy comet moth – also known as moon moth – is probably one of the most beautiful lepidopterans; and with a wingspan of 20 cm it is definitely one of the largest moths. It’s a dimorphic species: males have a lot longer tail while females have a bit rounder and broader wings. The adults of this nocturnal moths can not feed: they live from the supplies built up as caterpillar before – that lasts only five to six days, so they only mate and lay eggs during their short lives.
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Scientists at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory have found that currents connecting the Indian and Pacific Oceans are colder and deeper than originally believed. This discovery may one day help climate modelers predict the intensity of the Asian monsoon or El Nino with greater accuracy and with more lead-time than is currently possible.
The findings by Arnold Gordon, R. Dwi Susanto and Kevin Vranes appear in the October 23 issue of the journal Nature. Their work is the first to combine comprehensive temperature and velocity measurements of an ocean current known as the Indonesian throughflow (ITF) with regional wind data to provide a comprehensive picture of how an important piece of the ocean-atmosphere-climate puzzle works.
"Before now, most people thought the ITF was mostly on the surface," said Vranes, a former graduate student at Lamont. "Our work shows that the majority of the water flows in the thermocline about 300m below the surface, which makes the overall average flow colder than assumed."
The ITF is a network of currents that carry tropical Pacific Ocean water into the Indian Ocean through the straits and passages of the Indonesian Archipelago. On average, the ITF flows at a rate of 10 million cubic meters per second (nearly 3 trillion gallons per second), or more than 50 times the average flow of the Amazon River.
The ITF is unique among the world's inter-ocean currents because it is the only one that exchanges tropical waters between two oceans-all other ocean interchanges occur in the extreme northern or southern latitudes, where the water is already very cold. As a result, the ITF is thought to be an important factor in governing the exchange of heat between the Indian and Pacific Oceans and, consequently, between the oceans and the atmosphere.
"The ocean may very well act as a pace maker to the El Nino and the Asian monsoon," said Gordon, the lead author on the study. "Which means we might one day be able to predict the intensity of the monsoon a year ahead of time by monitoring the Indonesian throughflow."
Previously, scientists thought most of the water moving between the Pacific and the Indian Ocean did so on or near the surface, where water temperatures hover around 75°F (24°C). However, using two long-term measuring stations moored in Indonesia's Makassar Strait, Gordon and the other researchers examined water flow, temperature and salinity from the surface of the strait to the bottom between December 1996 and June 1997. They found that the bulk of the water passing through the strait, which funnels more than 90 percent of the ITF, flowed well below the surface where it could not be warmed by the atmosphere. As a result, it averaged about 59°F (15°C).
Gordon and the others then examined regional wind patterns for the same period. They found that prevailing winds from January to February and again between May and June blow large rafts of buoyant fresh water into areas that effectively block surface water from contributing to the ITF. This, they believe, forces the overall flow to run much deeper and colder than previously thought.
"Before the heat transfer between the Pacific and Indian Oceans was essentially a guess," said Gordon. "Now we have data."
This research is supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the Office of Naval Research.
The Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, a member of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, is one of the world's leading research centers examining the planet from its core to its atmosphere, across every continent and every ocean. From global climate change to earthquakes, volcanoes, environmental hazards and beyond, Observatory scientists provide the basic knowledge of Earth systems needed to inform the future health and habitability of our planet. For more information, visit http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu.
The Earth Institute at Columbia University is the world's leading academic center for the integrated study of Earth, its environment, and society. The Earth Institute builds upon excellence in the core disciplines -earth sciences, biological sciences, engineering sciences, social sciences and health sciences - and stresses cross-disciplinary approaches to complex problems. Through its research training and global partnerships, it mobilizes science and technology to advance sustainable development, while placing special emphasis on the needs of the world's poor. For more information, visit http://www.earth.columbia.edu.
The above story is based on materials provided by The Earth Institute At Columbia University. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
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It’s easy to miss the real meaning of Christmas, but the story of Christmas tells us who found it.
- The Shepherds – They were social nobodies – yet God sent them a supernatural birth announcement through the angels. They believed God’s Word, and they searched in faith to find Jesus, and they did. They found Christmas.
- The Wise Men – They were pagans from another culture. They studied the stars for insight. God spoke to them where they were, and they stepped out on faith to follow a star that appeared in the sky – thinking it meant the birth of a special king. And they found Christmas when they found Jesus.
The shepherds found Christmas because they believed the Word of God. The wise men found Christmas because they as seekers found Jesus. You find Jesus as Savior and Lord, and you’ll find Christmas – guaranteed!


Discuss: Raster vs Vector Graphics
11 unread reply.11 reply.
Go to Discussions tab, find “Raster vs. vector graphics” forum.
1. Briefly explain the difference between raster graphics and vector graphics (10 points);
2. Find and post information about at least 3 raster graphics programs (name, company, and cost) and at least 3 vector graphics programs (name, company, and cost) (10 points);
3. Find and read, from any professional conference, journal, article, online source, one articles relevant to the process of graphic design layout and style. Write a two paragraph review for the article. The 1st paragraph should describe the contents of the article. The 2nd paragraph should be your reaction to the article. Do not forget to include the reference cite. Use APA format (Links to an external site.). (20 points)


Temperatures will reach up to 20C on Sunday in parts of the south and east and will get up to double figures across all of Britain after one of the coldest recorded Marches in history.
Sky News meteorologist Chris England said temperatures are set to rise next week as the jet stream steers away from the Atlantic. The narrow band of very strong winds, which moves weather systems around the globe, has been blamed for the recent bad weather.
He said: "It's going to turn warmer as the weather system comes over from the south but the downside is that there'll be rain and wind before we get there."
Billy Payne, a forecaster for the Press Association, said: "We are seeing change on the way through today, with heavy rain pushing north and bringing temperatures up with milder air before things get warmer next week.
"By Sunday and into Monday temperatures should be driving towards 20C in the south east and East Anglia, and double digits in Scotland and the north of England."
The unseasonable weather has caused chaos for farmers, the transport network and homeowners throughout March and the Easter holiday.
In some parts of Britain, the continuously low temperatures have formed rarely seen ice formations.
Hundreds of farmers have lost livestock and wildlife is said to have been hit hard by weather that has left many animals struggling to find food.
Average temperatures between March 1 and 26 were just 2.5C (36.5F), three degrees below the long-term average, the Met Office said.
This would make it the coldest March since 1962 and also the fourth coldest in the UK since records began in 1910.
The coldest March in the UK was in 1962, at 1.9C (35.4F), followed by 1947, 2.2C (35.9F), 1937, 2.4C (36.3F), and 1916 and 1917, 2.5C (36.5F).
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The broad definition of molecular biology is the study of biological phenomena from the molecular perspective. The narrow definition is the study of the molecular level of gene structure and function. This is a discipline derived from genetics and biochemistry.
Molecular biology is mainly devoted to the development of research techniques for the interaction between different systems in cells, including the relationships between DNA, RNA, protein and protein biosynthesis and understanding how they are regulated.
Molecular biology mainly studies the molecular basis of the processes of replication, transcription and translation of genetic material. The central principle of molecular biology is that “DNA transcribes mRNA, mRNA translates protein, and protein in turn assists the first two processes and assists in DNA self-replication”. While this description is too simplistic (especially as new functions of RNA are still being discovered), but it is nevertheless a good starting point for understanding the field.
The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is an extremely versatile technique for replicating DNA in vitro. In short, PCR technology enables single-stranded DNA to be copied millions of times, and also allows the DNA sequence to be modified in a predetermined way. For example, PCR technology can be used to introduce restriction sites, or to mutate (change) specific DNA bases. PCR technology can also be used to obtain specific DNA fragments from a complementary DNA (cDNA) library, or from another perspective, to determine whether a cDNA library contains specific DNA fragments.
CareLink’s equipment was designed specifically for use in molecular biology labs.


to make one’s way through woods by cutting at undergrowth, branches, etc.
to travel through woods.
to pull a boat upstream from on board by grasping bushes, rocks, etc., on the shore.
to fight as a bushwhacker or guerrilla in the bush.
to fight as a bushwhacker; ambush.
to defeat, especially by surprise or in an underhanded way:
They bushwhacked our high school team when they used college players.
a person or thing that bushwhacks.
(in the American Civil War) a guerrilla, especially a Confederate.
any guerrilla or outlaw.
Australian Slang. an unsophisticated person; hick.
The Recollections of A Drummer-Boy Harry M. Kieffer
The Citizen-Soldier John Beatty
Duffels Edward Eggleston
Thirty Years on the Frontier Robert McReynolds
The Maids of Paradise Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
First on the Moon Jeff Sutton
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 10, Slice 6 Various
History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) Various
Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves Work Projects Administration
Slim Evans and his Horse Lightning Graham M. Dean
(transitive) (US & Canadian, Austral) to ambush
(intransitive) (US & Canadian, Austral) to cut or beat one’s way through thick woods
(intransitive) (US & Canadian, Austral) to range or move around in woods or the bush
(intransitive) (US & Canadian) to fight as a guerrilla in wild or uncivilized regions
(intransitive) (NZ) to work in the bush, esp at timber felling
(US & Canadian, Austral) a person who travels around or lives in thinly populated woodlands
(Austral, informal) an unsophisticated person; boor
a Confederate guerrilla during the American Civil War
(US) any guerrilla
(NZ) a person who works in the bush, esp at timber felling
To assault, esp from ambush: Two guys jumped out and bushwhacked him
To attack violently: After that speech the President felt bushwhacked
noun a wren, Xenicus longipes, occurring in New Zealand: family Xenicidae See also rifleman (sense 2) Historical Examples McClure’s Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 Various
verb (Austral, slang) (intransitive) to clear scrubland to drive through thick scrubland
noun another name for karearea
noun (pl) -babies any agile nocturnal arboreal prosimian primate of the genera Galago and Euoticus, occurring in Africa south of the Sahara: family Lorisidae (lorises). They have large eyes and ears and a long tail Also called galago


It is very large with an alternating spiral to elliptical shape, obscured by dense cloudy dust and looks strangely familiar. What is it? The NGC 7049 galaxy, dubbed “Crown of Thorns” because of its eerily look-a-like to the crown of thorns pushed down on the head of Jesus of Nazareth 2000 years ago.
The Crown of Thorns is located in the southern constellation known as Indus and is one of the brighter cluster of galaxies (BCG’s) so far photographed by Hubble.
Composed of uncounted stars, space dust and debris, it is quite an amazing and beautiful site. These type of BSGs are normally much older and quite large compared to their younger brethren, such as our own Milky Way Galaxy, which is a baby in age by comparison.
[NASA Hubble Telescope Phot]


Also found in: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Legal, Financial, Encyclopedia.
the amount by which a quantity or group is diminished; something that escapes from its owner's possession.
hearing loss see hearing loss.
insensible loss (insensible water loss) the amount of fluid lost on a daily basis from the lungs, skin, and respiratory tract, as well as water excreted in the feces; the exact amount cannot be measured, but it is estimated to be between 40 cc and 600 cc in an adult under normal circumstances. See also sweating.
A loss of body fluid that is not easily measured, e.g., the moisture released in exhalation and perspiration. The amount of fluid typically lost is about 200 mL a day. Insensible fluid losses increase in any disease or condition that increases diffusion of liquid from the skin or the lungs, e.g., in burns, climatic changes, fever, or heavy exercise.Synonym: insensible fluid loss
See also: loss


Leader: Jun Yano
Not offered in 2006.
Synopsis: The aim of this subject is to provide students with opportunities to develop a better understanding of the Japanese language system including grammar; morphology, lexicology, syntax and semantics through reading, discussion, activities (including error analysis) and exercises. This subject also deals with language diversity in society, including issues such as honorifics, male and female language, dialects and different styles related to communication mode; face to face, telephone, email, letter, etc.
Objectives: On completion of this unit, students should: 1. Have consolidated and improved their knowledge of linguistic aspects of Japanese, including morphology, lexicology, syntax and semantics. 2. Have improved their ability in speaking and comprehension through informal and formal discussion in Japanese. 3. Have further improved their reading ability of print and on-line texts using on-line glossaries and dictionaries. 4. Have improved their ability to write in Japanese, with particular reference to the skills of note-taking, and of summary, synthesis and argument in weekly exercises and an essay on a topic related to Japanese grammar and communication system. 5. Have further developed their communication skills by studying the diversity of the language such as honorifics, male and female languages, dialects and different styles and genres, and applying this knowledge to their communication. 6. Be able to use style and form of language appropriate to the situation. 7. Have further improved their IT and computer skills in a Japanese context, including wordprocessing and researching and recording information from Japanese databases. 8. Have developed their ability to analyse their own language use. 9. Have consolidated the kanji learnt in the previous levels and be able to recognize new kanji in daily use. 10. Have developed skills that will enable them to continue their Japanese acquisition outside the classroom.
Assessment: Written examination (2 hours): 35% + Oral Examination (equivalent to 1000 words): 20% + Regular class quizzes (equivalent to 500 words): 15% + Written exercises (equivalent to 800 words): 20% + Class performance: 10%
Contact Hours: 4 hours (1 x 1 hour lecture and 3 hours tutorials/seminars) per week
Prerequisites: JPL3520 and JPL3540


Effects of weather conditions on water quality in two small boreal rivers.
Arvola, Lauri; Hakala, Ilpo; Järvinen, Marko; Huitu, Eeva; Mäkelä, Suvi
Water chemistry data on two small boreal rivers in southern Finland were analysed in relation to local and regional (NAO) weather conditions. The data set was based on daily weather and runoff measurements and weekly chemical sampling. The data set started in autumn 1994 and continued until the end of 2000. The results indicated that air temperature and precipitation explained a high proportion of the annual and seasonal variability in water quality in these two rivers. However, the relationships between the weather and water quality variables were masked by time lags in hydrology, seasonality and complexity of the affecting factors. Based on the regression analyses of the different seasons, the seasonal and annual nutrient concentrations could be modelled adequately using hydrological data. This implies that weather conditions are among the most important driving forces in determining the nutrient concentrations of the out-flowing waters in these boreal drainage basins. The results indicate that, in terms of nutrient leaching from the drainage basins, the most sensitive periods of the year are late autumn and winter. At that time the regional and local weather conditions were highly correlated, as were the local weather and discharge. In the short-term, the most critical meteorological factors appear to be air temperature and precipitation, since they strongly affect nutrient leaching and transportation from the drainage basin.