Faustus
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Posts posted by Faustus
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Some interesting developments of with Obama of late:
1. He created for himself a pseudo presidential <SEAL> very much like the actual presidential seal and positioned it on his podium when speaking
2. He is going to make a trip to Iraq soon, and while passing through Europe has stated a desire to make a speech at the Brandenburg Gate. Previously two past presidents have made speeches there. John F. Kennedy (The "I am a Berliner" speech, early in the cold war) and Ronald Reagan ("Mr Gorbachev, bring down this wall" speech, at the height of the cold war)
(He seems to be taking on the mantle of the presidency so that it is an accepted fact, before the fact.)
3. He will also likely exploit the speech in Berlin as an affirmation of his popularity abroad, the audacity of hope indeed....
I personally have no objection; I
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A "Private" and "Public" Spaces: The Components of the Domus - The Relation of Inside to Outside: Yvon Th
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The most important thing Rome did for ancient Greece was to pass on their Civilization to the west, better than they could have done it for themselves...
Salve, Amici. Let me see if I got it straight on the Greek culture spread.
Practically all the Eastern half of the Roman Empire, southern Italy (Magna Graecia), Sicily and the area surrounding Massalia and other Greek colonies (ie, in eastern Spain) were, by definition, Hellenized previous to the Roman conquest.
At least to some degree, that was probably also the case for Carthage and its dependences.
Do you consider the spread of their culture to the remaining Roman territories conferred any particular benefit or advantage to the Greeks?
The advantage that comes from being at the cultural center of a unified whole (an empire or cosmos) as compared to that of being an
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The most important thing Rome did for ancient Greece was to pass on their Civilization to the west, better than they could have done it for themselves:
[ In his book A History of Private Life
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Even if the true impact of supply were not effected for several years, just the idea of increasing domestic oil production and refining would put downward pressure on the speculative pricing per barrel.
There has been a nine percent drop in the price of a barrel of oil in two days. This is on the cusp of certain members of the US Congress showing signs of weakening on drilling for more oil on American soil. Which party is seen to have a stanglehold on more drilling? Which party seems to be gelded on the subject? Announcements by which party would have that effect?
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Salve, Amici.
Here comes Caius Suetonius T. on the status of the Insulae at the time of the Great fire
"He devised a new form for the buildings of the city and in front of the houses and apartments he erected porches, from the flat roofs of which fires could be fought; and these he put up at his own cost".
In the view of any firefighter, the value of a porch with a flat roof is that it would be a good platform to work from (or gain access through a window) while not being immediately susceptible to the conflagration if the fire were contained inside of the building. But I wonder about the word
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This thread is great! Fantastic work everyone. Could I just add a little bit of interesting info regarding the use of the term domus. It absolutely predates the term villa as far as I can tell. That term probably came from an old italic term for village or settlement. In the earliest of the literature we have available, like Lucilius, Domus is used often to signify, not just a house, but the wider sense of home(as already said), both as the place where the familia hangs out and also in a more spiritual sense, like we might use ancestral seat. So if you think about the amount of cultural and spirtual value the Romans put on the term villa which was relatively new. The domus must have had enormous significance to the Romans.
SF
Salve SF, and interesting that you would bring that up.
The villa is a greater complex than the home (domus), as it seemed to require or depend on a greater number of people beyond the way we consider the domus to work. The villa was more of a
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Salve, A, and in return you also have my thanks for the latest information on tektites, and some strewn fields (some are missing I think) , and also the link to scientific thinking/scientific method, all of which I can benefit from.
BTW Years back I subscribed to catalogues of new meteorite finds available for purchase (never bought any) , and I can look again at that possibility, at seemingly very low prices.
Faustus
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With all due respect, I think it would be quite beneficial for a curiosity as highly developed as yours a more intimate contact with the basics of the scientific method, for example HERE.
Thanks A.
Thanks for your interest in my scientific foundation. It does need some shoring up.
As an amateur astronomer of 50 plus years, and a follower of all reports scientific,my understanding of the
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I found this from a quick Google images search. Only thing I could find through 3 different image searches.
Salve Zanatos,
That's as neat as it can be! Notice the grid system to the streets, how development proceded from the river, and how the grid was readjusted near the river to make the road pattern as efficient as possible. I put it up as my desktop background. What is built now in the triangluar (point) block at the lower right hand side of the photo in the foreground? A monument perhaps?
Faustus
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At tunguska, it was reported that trees were left standing and stripped of branches at the epicenter,
Anyhow, I still think the airblast from an ice meteorite (comet core?) is the best explanation.
I have considered a couple of potential objections in previous posts.
I for one lean more so toward the icy body because the amount of matter involved could more easily be obliterated leaving behind no detectable physical remnants; Ice to water vapor in an explosive blast of steam, and a dust layer with interstices, vaporized(?) and scattered. It is difficult for me to account for a massive rocky body 60 feet (tens of meters) in diameter being totally gone without a physical trace: a flaming fireball in one instance and totally annihilated in the next, without even the standard signature of iridium. A vaporized rocky meteorite should
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Replicability is one of the main bases for scientific knowledge (ie, if we replicate the critical conditions, the resultant phenomenon predictably happens). Conversely, its absence must be considered a caveat for any scientific hypothesis.
Thanks for the summary, and the caveat.
Here's some frequency information on stony meteorites of T(unguska)-sized objects and smaller:
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From where I am, the main problem for the "comet's core" explanation is that such phenomena hasn't been observed twice, as far as I'm aware.
A., please help me with that.
Not being a scientist I
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A regular airburst from the upper atmosphere wouldn't explain:
- The destruction of such big area of Siberian forest.
- An earthquake equivalent to (estimated) Richter 5.0
- Fluctuations in atmospheric pressure strong enough to be detected in Great Britain.
- An observed decrease in atmospheric transparency in the United States from the suspended dust that lasted for several months.
At the risk of overstating the obvious, any regular meteorite of enough volume to explain such massive release of energy MUST have left a huge crater.
Salve A.
All for the sake of argument (from a non-scientist)
Except for the R-5 quake, which is only conjecture, (as are all my remarks) all of the conditions can be met by a tenuously agglomerated snowball interlaced with space dust serving to weld ancient collision aggregates into one large cometary object.
If the height of the
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It turns out that unbeknown to me the tunguska event is not unusual. Such an event is believed to occur once every three hundred years on average somewhere around the world, and US defence analysis suggests that airburts in the upper atmosphere from small objects are regular occurences.
As for distibution of the craters of more physical impacts, remember that the continents have moved around a lot over the ages. The earths landmass has migrated northwards since the oceans formed.
Heck C.
That's the whole idea. And the larger, the less frequent
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Wow; after a couple of never-ending historical arguments over Latin gossip, nothing like a cosmic ephemeron to remind us our true place within the universal scheme.
The most unusual fact of the Tunguska event was the obvious discrepancy between its known physical effects and the absence of any impact crater.....
The Tektite Mystery
There are across America, and other parts of the world as well, large oval elliptical areas where green glassy tektites may be found. The shape and sizes of these areas are now called
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The BBC article estimates the blast at 1'000 times that of the Hiroshima bomb. I find a yield of 14 megatons a bit difficult to believe, and there doesnt appear to have been a fireball. 1 megaton I can accept.
The land area laid waste and immediately leveled (wooden structures) by Hiroshima
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Tunguska is unusual because its the only example of an airblast recorded. I'm going to discount tales of alien spacecraft - there's absolutely no evidence for that at all - but it does beg the question what the object was and why did it explode above the earths surface? very strange.
Consider the calculation methods for the size of the body that made the Chicxulub Crater for some perspective: "Using estimates of the total amount of iridium in the K
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Highlighting some interesting differences between Roman and Greek private houses, here comes Marcus Vitruvius Pollio.....
"The Greeks using no atrium, and not building as we do, make a passage, of no great breadth, from the entrance gate, on one side whereof the stable is placed, and on the other the porter's rooms, which immediately adjoin the inner gates....."
Going back to the opening post, the basic Aristocratic Roman domus (as distinguished from the an apartment house of Rome or Ostia, or the rural bungalo) began as an entryway leading to an atrium with rooms grouped around it. Later, onto that first section a rear section was added and rooms grouped around a peristylum.
"Simple Domus Floor Plan" (SHOWN FOR ILLUSTRATION PURPOSES)
The first section was Italian, and the names were Latin: The vestibulum, fauces, atrium, alae, tablinum, taberba, hortus. The rear or additional section, Greek in origin and design, had names which were Greek: the peristylum, triclinium, oecus, exhedra, (and then the aforementioned Italian (Latin named) hortus).
Interestingly the connecting passage between the two sections (atrium to perstyle) was called the andron(es) where a confusion occurs, is a misuse or misapplication of the Greek word. As Vitruvius says: "Between the peristylium and the lodging rooms are passages, which are called Mesaul
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One of my Latin professors compared Roman household furnishings to "US patio furniture," no stuffed sofas or cushioned chairs, all metal.
An interesting aside L.
Here are some links showing Roman "furnishings" from The House of the Faun.
At the time of the eruption, it appears that Pompeiian homes contained only the bare minimum of furniture. Much of what did survive (assuming some cushions and other soft materials were lost) was bronze and iron in the form of folding stands, tables, braziers, etc.
FLOOR PLAN for The House of the Faun.
Edit:
The (floor plan) link is from a 1958 source. Since then Salvatorre Nappo
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A mystery that continues to stump me is the peculiarly
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I must admit that some houses (Not all) give a certain feeling of that the door should be about one meter in. Take the Cave Canem as an example. What good would it have done behind a closed door?
At the same time, I'm not entirely convinced.
Salve Amica, Amici
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We usually call the roman house the
The Art Of Offending
in Arena
Posted
Amsterdam The Perils of Free Speech (What goes around, comes around.)
"On a sunny May morning, six plainclothes police officers, two uniformed policemen and a trio of functionaries from the state prosecutor's office closed in on a small apartment in Amsterdam. Their quarry: a skinny Dutch cartoonist with a rude sense of humor. Informed that he was suspected of sketching offensive drawings of Muslims and other minorities, the Dutchman surrendered without a struggle.
"I never expected the Spanish Inquisition," recalls the cartoonist, who goes by the nom de plume Gregorius Nekschot, quoting the British comedy team Monty Python. A fan of ribald gags, he's a caustic foe of religion, particularly Islam. The Quran, crucifixion, sexual organs and goats are among his favorite motifs.
Mr. Nekschot, whose cartoons had appeared mainly on his own Web site, spent the night in a jail cell. Police grabbed his computer, a hard drive and sketch pads. He's been summoned for further questioning later this month by prosecutors. He hasn't been charged with a crime, but the prosecutor's office says he's been under investigation for three years on suspicion that he violated a Dutch law that forbids discrimination on the basis of race, religion or sexual orientation.
The cartoon affair has come as a shock to a country that sees itself as a bastion of tolerance