Orr's Law

"Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover will prove." -- Robert Anton Wilson, polymath, Prometheus Rising, 1983

Walking 2 Million Years Older Than Darwinists Assumed

Science Daily: Ancient Footprints Show Human-Like Walking Began Nearly 4 Million Years Ago.

ScienceDaily (July 19, 2011) — Scientists at the University of Liverpool have found that ancient footprints in Laetoli, Tanzania, show that human-like features of the feet and gait existed almost two million years earlier than previously thought.

Many earlier studies have suggested that the characteristics of the human foot, such as the ability to push off the ground with the big toe, and a fully upright bipedal gait, emerged in early Homo, approximately 1.9 million years-ago.

Liverpool researchers, however, in collaboration with scientists at the University of Manchester and Bournemouth University, have now shown that footprints of a human ancestor dating back 3.7 million years ago, show features of the foot with more similarities to the gait of modern humans than with the type of bipedal walking used by chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas.

The footprint site of Laetoli contains the earliest known trail made by human ancestors and includes 11 individual prints in good condition. Previous studies have been primarily based on single prints and have therefore been liable to misinterpreting artificial features, such as erosion and other environmental factors, as reflecting genuine features of the footprint. This has resulted in many years of debate over the exact characteristics of gait in early human ancestors.

Power From Air

"Ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point of the universe." -- Nikola Tesla, physicist, 1892

Science Daily: Power from the Air: Device Captures Ambient Electromagnetic Energy to Drive Small Electronic Devices.

ScienceDaily (July 8, 2011) — Researchers have discovered a way to capture and harness energy transmitted by such sources as radio and television transmitters, cell phone networks and satellite communications systems. By scavenging this ambient energy from the air around us, the technique could provide a new way to power networks of wireless sensors, microprocessors and communications chips.

"There is a large amount of electromagnetic energy all around us, but nobody has been able to tap into it," said Manos Tentzeris, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering who is leading the research. "We are using an ultra-wideband antenna that lets us exploit a variety of signals in different frequency ranges, giving us greatly increased power-gathering capability."

Tentzeris and his team are using inkjet printers to combine sensors, antennas and energy scavenging capabilities on paper or flexible polymers. The resulting self powered wireless sensors could be used for chemical, biological, heat and stress sensing for defense and industry; radio frequency identification (RFID) tagging for manufacturing and shipping, and monitoring tasks in many fields including communications and power usage.

A presentation on this energy scavenging technology was given July 6 at the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Symposium in Spokane, Wash. The discovery is based on research supported by multiple sponsors, including the National Science Foundation, the Federal Highway Administration and Japan's New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO).

Francis Bacon On Dogmatic Censors and Editors

"They who have presumed to dogmatize on nature, as on some well investigated subject, either from self-conceit or from arrogance, and in the professorial style, have inflicted the greatest injury on philosophy and learning. For they have tended to stifle and interrupt inquiry exactly in proportion as they have prevailed in bringing others to their opinion; and their own activity has not counterbalanced the mischief they have occasioned by corrupting and destroying that of others." -- Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, 1620

When Did Homo Erectus Live in Indonesia?

Science Daily: Human Ancestor Older Than Previously Thought.

The team applied two different dating techniques to the sites. Like earlier work, they used the techniques -- U-series and Electron Spin Resonance, or ESR -- that are applied to fossilized teeth. They also used a technique called argon-argon dating that is applied to volcanic minerals in the sediments. All three methods use radioactive decay in different ways to assess age and all yielded robust and methodologically valid results, but the ages were inconsistent with one another.

The argon-argon results yielded highly precise ages of about 550,000 years old on pumices -- very light, porous volcanic products found at Ngandong and Jigar.

"Pumices are hard to rework without breaking them, and these ages are quite good, so this suggests that the hominins and fauna are this old as well," said project geochronologist Carl Swisher of Rutgers University.

By contrast, the oldest of the U-series and ESR ages, which were conducted at Australian National University by Rainer Grün, are just 143,000 years.

The difference in the ages means that one of the systems is providing an age for something other than the formation of the sites and fossils in them. One possibility is that the pumices are, in fact, reworked, or mixed in, from older rocks. The other possibility is that the ESR and U-series ages are dating an event that occurred after the sites were formed, perhaps a change in the way groundwater moved through the sites.

Either way, the ages provide a maximum and a minimum for the sites -- and both of these ages are older than the earliest Homo sapiens fossils in Indonesia. Thus, the authors concluded that the idea of a population of Homo erectus surviving until late in time in Indonesia and potentially interacting with Homo sapiens seems to have been disproven.

Foundations of Science and Mathematics

“If we consider, for instance, the concept of the electron and seek it’s meaning, we are led back to Faraday’s investigation of electrolysis, and to J.J. Thompson’s study of deflection of cathode rays acted upon by electric and magnetic fields. Faraday found that the weight of a metal deposited in electrolysis is proportional to the amount of electricity employed, and, in fact, that the amount of electricity required to deposit a given number of atoms of any metal is always the same or else a small whole-number multiple of the unit quantity. Since all chemical substances were regarded as consisting of atoms, he hypothesized that electricity was also atomic in character, that is, made up of discrete unit charges. This result depends, then, on the prior development of an atomic theory of matter, and on the prior development of means measuring quantity and intensity of electricity.” –- Curtis Wilson, Dean, St John’s College, Foundations of Science and Mathematics, 1960

“The unearthing of presuppositions and buried meanings carries us back beyond Newton to the first deductive science of all, the science of geometry, which has its faraway origins in the everyday techniques of the surveyor and the carpenter….” –- Curtis Wilson, Dean, St John’s College, Foundations of Science and Mathematics, 1960

“… for the most part the best way to become acquainted with the methods of science is to read what great scientists themselves have to say about their discoveries – how they came to make them, how they interpreted them, and by what reasoning they arrived at their conclusions concerning them.” -- Mortimer J. Adler and Peter Wolff, Foundations of Science and Mathematics, 1960

“Falsity is not a problem in the mathematical works. The truths demonstrated by the ancients are still acknowledged to be true.” -- Mortimer J. Adler and Peter Wolff, polymaths, Foundations of Science and Mathematics, 1960

“The word itself [geometry], meaning ‘earth measurement,’ indicates the quite earthy and practical origin of the science in ancient Egypt and Babylonia.” – Mortimer J. Adler and Peter Wolff, polymaths, Foundations of Science and Mathematics, 1960

“The names of many ancient mathematicians and scientists are quite unfamiliar to most of us.” -- Mortimer J. Adler and Peter Wolff, polymaths, Foundations of Science and Mathematics, 1960

“We are inclined to think that, although the Greeks may have had keen mathematical insight, they entirely lacked knowledge of the structure of the physical world. We regard the science of physics as a modern development, dating back only to the 16th century. A cursory glance at Archimedes’ work on the equilibrium of centers of gravity of bodies should dispel this erroneous idea. Here is a work on theoretical physics, written in the 3rd century B.C. It deals with typical physical problems of weights, balances, and distances, and it demonstrates the solutions in much the same way as we do nowadays.” -- Mortimer J. Adler and Peter Wolff, polymaths, Foundations of Science and Mathematics, 1960

“Archimedes was not only a first rate scientist, but also a brilliant mathematician.” -- Mortimer J. Adler and Peter Wolff, Foundations of Science and Mathematics, 1960

“The motions of the heavenly bodies have played a prominent role in the thoughts and lives of men since the earliest known times.” –- Mortimer J. Adler and Peter Wolff, polymaths, Foundations of Science and Mathematics, 1960

Science In Myth

"It's that little grain of truth that we always look for in a myth. There it was." -- Mythbusters